The Weathervane

 I can still hear that high pitched screeching as it spun overhead.

I was in my Great Aunt Mary’s old general store in Cottondale, Fla. It was a Sunday afternoon in early summer and Granny and Grandpa and I were visiting family again, like it or not.

Aunt Mary was my Grandpa Tharpe’s oldest sister. She had basically raised grandpa, what with his momma and daddy both dying early in his life. She was the quietest of his three sisters, and the most reclusive. Why a recluse opens up a general store, I’ll never know; but she did.

She was a classic spinster. Never married, greatly revered in town, and she carried with her the proud air of settled loneliness.

I can’t say that I knew her very well; she didn't allow me to. I don’t think she cared for children all that much; but I sure did love being in her calming presence, and I loved her old store.

It was all closed up by the time I came around, but she never cleaned it out. What was there on the day she closed the doors for the last time, stayed, and I don’t think she ever went back in.

She would let me and my brother plunder in there from time to time, as a way to get us out from underfoot; but other than that, I don’t think she ever darkened the door.

Well, on this particular day, I was plundering on my own. Mike had gone back to Utica with the family a week or so before, which left me to take care of the mischievousness all by myself. 

I was well trained in the art, and possessed a tendency toward mischief that was the envy of many of my contemporaries, so the duty wasn't a burden.
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So I was in there looking for trouble and snake skins, we called them scalps back then, and was doing pretty well for myself when that screeching started.

It filled the room with the most awfulest of sounds. It sounded like a thousand fingernails on a chalkboard with just a hint of Rosanne Barr’s voice mixed in. It was dreadful.  

Well, I had to get out of there or go crazy, so I ran out in the front yard. Then I looked back, trying to figure out where that horrible sound was coming from, and it didn’t take me long to figure it out.

The old weathervane, complete with a galvanized tin arrow and a rooster on top, was spinning like a dreidel and shrieking like a demon. It just couldn't decide which way to go.

I was so focused on its spinning and that wicked sound it made, that I failed to notice the blackness behind it and the wind in my ears.

Then all of a sudden the thing made up its mind, and there I was with the arrow pointed straight at me and the rooster wondering what I was doing standing around when I ought to be hightailing it out of there.

Well, I decided that the rooster had a point. That ghastly sound was preferable to whatever was hiding behind that blackness; so I headed back into the building, hands over my ears with my stomach in my throat.

About that time the storm hit. Howling wind first followed by a driving rain, a frog strangler as Granny would say, and then a hail storm like none before or since arrived.

I have always loved the sound of a gentle rain on a tin roof; that sound will lull you to sleep in a skinny minute, but hail is another thing altogether.

I thought it was going to drive my scrawny little frame into the ground like a railroad spike. But God is good, and I was only ankle deep when that commotion stopped just as quickly as it started.

As it turns out, that storm took out a bunch of trees and a couple of houses on the other side of town, but the only thing missing from Aunt Mary’s place was the aforementioned weather vane. Never saw it again; it’s either in orbit, or it’s over near Chipley. One way or the other the screeching stopped.

My young mind had been fascinated by weathervanes up until then. Before that day, I looked at them as toys. You know something you threw rocks at and made spin when boredom overtook you. I thought they were really neat, but I never looked at them as tools.

I learned that day that weather vanes will tell you what’s coming. They will warn you of danger; if you are paying attention and you’d better be paying attention.

Lately some in the church have been throwing rocks at the weathervane trying to make it turn in a way that suits their fancy. Some prefer a gentle horizontal breeze to a stiff vertical one; it’s just more pleasant. It’s easier to deal with. That gentle breeze doesn’t ruffle nearly as many feathers as the stiff one does. Oh, that stiff breeze may expose the chaff and clean things up a bit making it suitable, but who wants that? That only makes for work. 

So they keep throwing their irreverent rocks, hoping against hope that the keeper of the wind will relent; but they are tilting at windmills. That is an ancient wind and it has been challenged time and time again never to yield, forever standing firm.

We had best be very careful as a people and as a church lest in our arrogance and pride we lose our direction and find ourselves carried away by the winds.

The Holy Scriptures are not of our making. We would be well advised to remember that!

Matt 5:18
18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
NIV
 

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