Not all connected by genes but all bound by love

Great grandson Javier and his mother

On Sunday evening our family gathered at the Olive Gardens restaurant in Elkhart to celebrate Christmas and New Year  holidays.   Several days before that my daughter, Rachel, recalled a ditty that her  mother had taught her.  I did not remember it, but I think it may have shaped my understanding of the God’s Spirit.  Here is the lyric:

Javier and his father

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing by.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing through.

Since I am a word crafter, I wrote an original haiku as a gift for each member of the family and put the collections in twenty booklets.  I explained that a haiku is a form of Japanese poetry with a first line of only five syllables, a second line with only seven syllables and a final third line of only five syllables.  I included a sentence that seemed to me to be significant.  It went, “Our family members are not bound to each other by genes, but by providence or fate, and by love”  I could have said that our family has been blown together by the Spirit.

In my last blog I asked what the Holy Spirit is up to now. It was not a foolish question.  Jesus had explained on the night of his betrayal that he would send the Spirit in his place who would guide his disciples in to all truth and reveal things to come.  The staff of the  Mennonite collected significant articles published in 2016. Their work confirmed to me that the Spirit is still guiding, teaching and revealing.  Jesus was preparing his disciples to learn things not revealed by his words on earth, yet consistent with his activities.

Quite naturally I was the oldest person at our family gathering.  I wrote the following haiku as an introduction to the haikus that I gave to the family:

Grandfather Martin
moved with love wrote these Haiku
for his family

Javier Stoltzfus

For Javier I wrote the following haiku:

Javier the young
big eyes seeing all round him
learning from it all