Article October 27, 2003 Issue

Prayer on the wind

By Wendy Wylie Winegar

Have You Ever Been Awake in the middle of the night wondering what to do with your thoughts? Should you read a book? Watch TV? Check your e-mail? Well, at those moments, maybe it's time to pray.

Once, in the middle of a very snugly sleep, I awoke with a very unusual word voiced almost audibly in my dreams—loud enough to wake me up. The wind was screaming at high speeds outside. I lived in a highrise condo in the Great Salt Lake Valley of Utah, a wide low flatland bordered by a mountain range with 10,000-foot peaks on one side and the lake and salt flats on the other. In the right conditions, the unhindered winds from the west meeting the winds from the south can suddenly magnify normal wind velocities into nightmare conditions. That's what was happening that night. My building was shaking like crazy. This high-wind phenomenon always threatens homes and barns, but that night I was more concerned for the cross-country truckers out on the nearby interstate, whom I had seen on my way home earlier that evening.

The word that had come to me from out of the blue was Euroclydon. It coursed through my memory as I looked for some connection between it and my life. Then I recognized it as one of those words my young Sunday School students and I had stumbled on when reading a story about St. Paul in the Bible.