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Art Historian, Dr Jim Harris

I went to America last week, to do some work at the University of Wyoming in a town called Laramie.  I had the best time, talking at the University Art Museum, seeing friends and colleagues. Laramie is a legendary place.  Jimmy Stewart starred in a movie called The Man From Laramie and Butch Cassidy was in jail there.  It’s a cowboy town and a railroad town, surrounded by mountains and space and full of western warmth. It’s great.

Anyway, I got up early on Monday of last week, full of the joys, and looked out onto the most beautiful day: golden sunshine out of a clear, blue sky, and crisp shadows stretching forever across the high plains.  Perfect.  So, I decided to go for a run. Big mistake.  The first thing was the cold.  Never mind the glorious, golden sun, it was still about six degrees below freezing. Didn’t expect that.  Holy cow. Did. Not. Expect. That. The second thing was the oxygen - or, rather, the lack of it.  Laramie isn’t just near the mountains, it’s 7200 feet up.  That means thin air for weedy sea-level lungs.  I was gasping.

Later that day, I told my friend Isa how the run had gone and she laughed at me.  Kindly, I might add, but she still laughed.  It’s simple, really.  You can’t tell the temperature just by looking and you can’t expect to run at altitude like it’s sea level.

It’s often the things we can’t see that make the difference and, just as often they’re the most important things of all, like warmth, or oxygen. We can’t see them, but we can feel their effects. Just like love.   And just like God’s spirit.  Christians believe that although we can’t see it, it’s always at work, in acts of kindness, in healing and mending broken hearts.  Jesus compared God’s spirit to the wind, which blows wherever it pleases.  You hear it’s sound but you can’t tell where it comes from or where it’s going

I reckon that sometimes we need that, to feel something powerful and essential without seeing it.  Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that the visible world might not contain everything we need to survive.  Even if it takes being frozen and breathless to do it.