Greetings to you all in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ!

As I mentioned in church on Sunday, I have spent the first two weeks in Whitefish a bit baffled by the weather. Rain, sun, clammy cold, bursts of warmth: it can be all four seasons in one day, which has made it really hard to figure out how to mow my yard. If you walk by my house, you’ll notice the “layered” nature of my lawn as I struggle to keep up with the always-present moisture of the grass. (Please don’t judge!) 

For the past month I’ve been reading Ivan Doig. In his novels, set in the fictional Two Medicine country somewhere close to here, the weather is practically a main character. The dry heat of fire season, the rolling storms of spring, the indifferent coldness of winter snow. In his books, the shifting Montana winds shapes the land and writes their whims onto the faces of those who live here. In Doig’s homeland, the big sky is always larger than you are and always up to some sort of mischief.

All this musing about weather has found its way into my sermons this month, which probably explains why I compared the Holy Spirit to the snow-eating chinooks that flow down the backside of mountains.

Thinking about the weather seems like one sure way to think about the glory of God, especially in a corner of the world where the weather is bigger than us. Just as we learn to adjust to the vagaries of the clouds in Montana, so we learn patience in our walk with God. As we mature in Christ, we learn to not overreact to the storms and the perfect afternoons. We learn to trust in God regardless of the forecast and even, on a good day, to rejoice in the changing of the seasons in our lives.