#TestimonyTuesday – God’s voice silences the chaotic winds
Every Tuesday we’ll post a testimony with the hashtag #TestimonyTuesday.
It’s a great idea I was inspired to imitate, from another blogger. Testimonies are so powerful because they are truths from our life. I love reading them, and look forward to reading many more.
Testimonies are so wonderfully powerful!
A good friend Alan, on his blog – Devotional treasures – spoke of God speaking through nature in a post he shared last week. And that post reminded me of my own experience with a very real God who can, and will, speak through nature. You can read his post for yourself – it’s one of my favourites from this exceptional blogger. His post is called “A Meeting Place” (and I’m delighted to see and say that it features an image from Nathan of this Berrybunch.family ministry).
This one is from me – Andy B – the currently bearded face and voice you’ll see on he majority of posts on the BerryBunch.family Ministry Website. Father of 3 children, and one the family will see in heaven, and husband to Jo – the best gift that God ever gave him.
Andy B
Read on!
God’s voice silences the chaotic winds
When Jesus woke up, he rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Silence! Be still!” Suddenly the wind stopped, and there was a great calm. Then he asked them, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” Mark 4 v 39 – 40
These words are powerful to me for two reasons. The first is that we actually get to see some of the words spoken by Jesus Himself. The second is because I, too, have witnessed that same God controlling the winds in the middle of a storm.
Dunnet Head is the most northern point of mainland United Kingdom. It’s further north than the more famous John O’Groats. It is sufficiently far into the North Sea that the lighthouse has regularly lost its windows from stones thrown at it from the sea.
The lighthouse is very tall itself and stands on top of a high cliff face. When you realise how far up those windows are you begin to understand just how ferocious the storms can get there. It’s quite breath taking and mind blowing to be honest!
Check out the Dunnet Head Lighthouse Website for some photos from the sea that show exactly this.
Many years ago my family and I spent a lovely two weeks in a self-catering cottage on Dunnet Head. It’s one of our most favourite memories over our 25 years of marriage: it was just the four of us back then.
We’d frequently walk from the cottage to the lighthouse. It was idyllic!
At one point, and I have no clear memory why, I’d become really angry at God; really angry at Jo – just really angry at life, and with no one for any particular reason: life had become, simply, overwhelming for me, emotionally. I look back and suspect that God was gently trying to get me to see the childhood trauma I’d suffered, that took me many more years to process.
I do remember jumping in the car, and driving up to the lighthouse at Dunnet Head – when I knew I simply had to get some head space to think.
As I got out of the car I saw that there was nobody else around and I had a very loud chat with God. I told Him that He obviously didn’t care about me and my family (I said sorry later, but God is more than big enough for us to be very raw and real with Him!). I was really doubting whether God truly existed at that moment. It was far more than just a bad moment.
While standing at the top of that cliff, looking out to sea, with the lighthouse nearby, all the while being buffeted from every which way due to the ever changing wind direction and speed so it can be hard to even catch your breath, I screamed at God that if He really was real, He should stop the winds, just like Jesus did. In my head I knew that He either wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do that for me, because I simply wasn’t worth it.
I’ve since learned that God loves a challenge, because that is precisely what He did, and only as God could have done, with a few exclamation points at the end too, and His usual flair for the miraculous.
I’d been standing there, being pushed and pulled, from side to side, from front to back, with the gusting winds making you feel almost dizzy with its ferocity and ever changing direction! But as I finished shouting at God, the wind immediately stopped. Like, completely!
But that may have been missed by me in my angry state at that point. Wind is wind right? It starts and it stops.
God had a point to make here to me that day! Because the wind – having paused to the most peaceful conditions you could possibly imagine – slowly started up again, only now it came from just the one, clearly defined, direction.
It then stopped once more, and those exact same peaceful conditions occurred for the same length of time as before.
After that perfectly timed pause the wind slowly started up again, only from a brand new, clearly defined direction.
A moment later it paused once more, to that same peaceful state for the same length of time again.
On that day, on that cliff, God paused the wind 3 times – each time for the same length of time.
When the wind started up again in between those pauses it simply, slowly, rose in speed. It wasn’t like a light switch, but extremely controlled. I remember, very vividly, that it felt like it was being restrained. When the wind changed direction it was always from a brand new direction.
After the final pause the wind picked up again and slowly – as before – before continuing on to it’s frenetic moving direction shifting and variable wind speeds as God stopped restraining it.
I got straight back in the car and drove the short distance back to our cottage, sharing what God had done for me with Jo. Oh how we rejoiced together at God’s goodness and love for me, my for us, for our little family!
I’ve never known of the wind doing that before, or since. I’ve only read of one other account of this – Bear Grylls and his book about his crossing the Atlantic in a small, modified boat.
If you believe in coincidences perhaps you could argue that the wind can stop and start. But stop and start slowly? With perfectly timed pauses in between? With the wind changing to a fixed direction three times from a clearly defined direction every time?
There is no doubt in my mind that God was manipulating the winds that day.
He is a loving God and can cause even the strongest, and gustiest, of winds to do as their Maker instructs them.
I didn’t hear actual God’s voice in nature. But He certainly spoke to me through nature, in a way that was louder than the loudest noise imaginable!
I’ll share the [one] time God spoke to me in His own voice another time.
God is good and He has no equal!
Andy B