The Oasis - August 26, 2020
Author: Pastor Dan Hollis
August 26, 2020
August 26, 2020
by Pastor Dan
Keeping cool is a never-ending proposition, isn’t it? And I’m not talking about the kind of cool where you pop on a pair of sunglasses and a leather jacket and hip-check the jukebox at the local soda fountain. That kind of “cool” is effortless, right? (I’ll remind you all that I’m 31 and have never even seen a real-live soda fountain, and the bridge of my colossal schnoz has never met a pair of sunglasses it could tolerate for more than 20 minutes.)
I’m talking about summertime cool. We’ve been blessed with a relatively mild summer in York, all things considered, but there are still some days where there’s just no way to get out of the heat, and it’s hard to keep cool.
Sweat is a fascinating mechanism. I mean it’s gross and annoying, but the function behind it is ingenious. Our body gets too hot, and it decides—without any input from us, mind you—to start exuding water from our skin. This doesn’t cool us down on its own, of course, particularly because each droplet of sweat contains within it some of our own body heat. And that’s the whole point: the sweat sits on our skin, and evaporates into the air around us, taking along the heat it carried with it. And just like that, our body has started to cool.
Now, if the place where we’re standing doesn’t have any airflow, it won’t be long before the sweat actually stops evaporating. The air around us gets a little bit more humid, and shortly too full of water vapor (and the heat it brought along) to suck up any more. So we stand there, drenched, no cooler than we started. But if we add a breeze to the mix, or a wind, that changes everything. It doesn’t even have to be a colder breeze from far away, either. Just a little moving air from a little farther away will do the trick, because it pushes out the sweat-filled air hovering around us and replaces it with fresh air that—as long as it’s even a little bit less humid than the air around us—has plenty of room for more of our sweat.
The breeze, the wind, the fan: it takes away the sweat and the body heat that’s accumulated around you—that’s clinging to you. And it replaces it with something new, something that can carry more of that salty water oozing out of your pores. And it keeps you cool.
That’s one of the ways I look at God. The wind of the Holy Spirit blows by you—not even from very far away, maybe even from just the other side of the room—dissipates the clammy auras clinging to you, and can easily carry anything else that may come. Anything else that may ooze out of our pores. All our negative feelings, all our anger and sadness, our fear and or hatred, God has room enough to carry all of it, and carry it far away… if we allow it. If we plug in that fan. If we crack open that window and sit beside it. If we stop letting all that sweat cling to us and let it go into the arms of God.
Then it’s easy to keep cool.
“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters gradually receded from the earth.” Genesis 8:1-3
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