The wind's agitation of the weather, when it gathers sheets of rain into its cupped hand and flings them like a wet slap into your face or against your body, makes of it a bully. Any day, any weather. Without respect of persons, it grabs or slaps whoever or whatever stands in its way, and it does so without warning.

And yet it is its very calling to intervene and to intimidate. Its speed, its wildness and its course are predetermined patterns, finely calculated according to scientific plan and divine purpose. The human being becomes his own victim and stokes his own hurricane when his over-eager chasing to reach everything on his list erodes, slowly but surely, the meaningfulness out of his life — until at last he is like a machine that no longer even has the privilege of reacting on instinct.

Nature acts according to instinct. Things flower, bear fruit, shed their leaves and go into hibernation as they were programmed when God created them. The human being is not programmed. We were given a will and a moral choice which we can exercise. But materialism blinds our spiritual sight and starves our spiritual hunger into stagnation. Totally uprooted and made shallow, we focus all our energy and zeal on the temporary. Because we must eat, and we must have a place to live, and we must have things and enjoy them. We forget that the thin little layer of civilisation between us and total exposure and extinction is terribly fragile. Just see how quickly the human being — no matter how he buffers and armours himself — becomes desperate and defenceless before natural disasters, epidemics and accidents. The masses cannot feed or sustain themselves, they live off the supermarket and its infrastructure.

That there is a spiritual shelter around us, and a spiritual table at which we must daily take our place, escapes most of us. It escapes us because we are warm and comfortable and well-fed, and because we have a surplus to enjoy and to give away, but do not give. Because giving away and sharing out does not come to us by instinct. Adam lost the instructions. And so it is not our instinct to seek God, and it is not our instinct to esteem others above ourselves.

The only way God can get our attention and bring us back into contact with eternity is by throwing speed-bumps into our lives. Otherwise we drive ourselves to pieces. We may not crash, but wear and tear exacts what is owed to it, or else the fuel simply runs out. There is so much that needs speed-bumps: our tempers, our appetites, our urge to shop, but above all our ego, which so loves to collect medals. These all have to be held back at a pace of sixty or less, all the time.

God did not make us so that we would, by instinct, climb out of the chaotic whirling-about of survival and money-making, or so that one morning we would simply realise that our spirit is exhausted and starved for eternity and that our account with God is hopelessly overdrawn because it has been left inactive. It is a decision we have to make. Based on: enough is enough. When eternity comes back into our busy-ness and into our relationships, everything gains a whole spectrum of depth-perspective and eternity-value besides. Nothing we say and nothing we do is ever without consequence. For men it is cursed for three, for women for four, generations — or else it can be blessed for a thousand. But it is SIMPLICITY that then triumphs cum laude. Because it comes not only to the top of our busy list, but intervenes in everything we plan and in how we go about it.

To have a door that you can pull shut behind you at the end of the day to hold the rest of the world at arm's length for a while, is the most basic and wonderfully ENOUGH. To be able to pull shut the spiritual door against all and everyone set on numbing and wrecking your spirit is also a most basic privilege, and wonderfully POSSIBLE — made possible by a loving Father.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer