Last Saturday, I was preparing a Sunday School lesson for a group of singles the following day. In the process, I kept remembering a sermon my husband had preached many years before his death. His subject was “Leaning Against the Wind” and, in the sermon, Ralph discussed an experience he had as a graduate student in Boston.
Each weekday morning as he walked from his small apartment to school, he passed a construction site where the building was already 26 floors high. In fact, it was so high that the men working on the upper reaches looked like pygmies from Ralph’s spot on the ground.
One morning, the thing that he had feared might happen did happen. One of the workers lost his footing and fell to his death in front of the “sidewalk supervisors.” Standing in front of the splattered body, the foreman removed his hat and put it over his heart. Then he uttered these words, “I told him not to lean against the wind.”
Ralph, then a young theology student, had heard something he didn’t understand. So he waited until the body had been removed, the crowd had dispersed and the foreman was standing alone. Then Ralph asked why he had told the young man not to lean against the wind.
Thoughtfully, the foreman replied: “When the wind blows in from the ocean, it comes at quite a gale force. Down here, we don’t feel it so much because it’s absorbed by the buildings. Up there, the wind is such a force that workers can lean against it and get their work done more quickly. The danger, of course, is that the wind can quit blowing instantaneously, causing an accident like the one we just saw.”
In that worship service so long ago, my husband asked the worshippers, “What are you leaning against?” He was saying that our ultimate security is not found in external circumstances but in faith in the God who was, and is, and evermore shall be.
Contact Nell Mohney at nellwmohney@comcast.net.