Trusting the Spirit Anyway

There’s a strange kind of holiness in the middle of cardboard boxes.

This week my Silverton house has looked like a cross between a thrift store, a construction zone, and a storage unit explosion. There are stacks labeled “kitchen,” “books,” and “random cords we apparently decided to keep since 2009.” And then there is the new house – where a few pieces of furniture have now been built, kids rooms painted, and the carpet installed (Shout out to Carpet USA Vancouver – they were awesome!). I’m trying to pastor faithfully, answer emails, prepare worship, pack up an entire life, pull weeds at the new house, coordinate movers, and somehow remember where I put the tape gun for the fifteenth time.

And in the middle of all that chaos, the parsonage backyard has exploded in color – purple irises, pink roses, orange roses, red roses, and my favorite: white and red peonies.

Every year I wait for them with anticipation. They are extravagant flowers — oversized, dramatic, impossible to ignore. Their deep red/maroon petals unfold slowly and then all at once, like they’ve been storing beauty all winter just waiting for the right moment to burst open.

This year, knowing we are moving, I realized I would likely never see these particular peonies bloom again.

So I cut them.

I arranged them into a bouquet for Pentecost Sunday. It felt fitting somehow — red flowers for the day we remember the Spirit descending like fire. Red blooms spilling across the table while the church tells the story of wind, flame, courage, and transformation.

Pentecost is not a tidy story. It is a story filled with noise and confusion and people trying to understand what God is doing in the middle of upheaval. The Spirit arrives not when everyone is calm and organized, but when the disciples are uncertain and waiting.

Honestly, that feels a little too relatable right now.

Because I keep wanting this season of life to settle down before I can feel spiritually grounded again. I keep imagining holiness lives somewhere on the other side of the move — after the boxes are unpacked, after the yard is finished, after the paperwork is filed, after I finally stop feeling stretched in twelve directions at once.

But Pentecost reminds me that the Spirit has never waited for perfect conditions.

The Spirit shows up in the middle of the mess.

And then there is Aldersgate Day, celebrated each year on May 24 in the Methodist tradition. This year it falls on Pentecost Sunday. The day John Wesley described his heart being “strangely warmed” at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. That moment changed him. Not because his life suddenly became easy, but because he experienced deep assurance that God was already with him.

I’ve been thinking about that phrase all week: strangely warmed.

Not dramatically fixed.

Not suddenly organized.

Not magically rested.

Just warmed.

A quiet reminder of grace in the middle of ordinary life.

Maybe that’s what I needed this week in newspaper while wrapping dishes and trying to not pack the things we need in these last few weeks. Maybe grace sometimes arrives not as certainty, but as warmth. A bouquet of peonies on the kitchen table. A hymn hummed while taping boxes shut. A church sanctuary dressed in red for Pentecost. The smell of new carpet at the new house. Giving up cooking in favor of take out for a few weeks. Congregations offering patience. Teens adapting more bravely than expected.

Small flames everywhere.

This move feels like an ending in many ways. I will miss these peonies dearly. I will miss familiar rhythms and familiar streets. I will miss the life that has unfolded here.

But Pentecost is also the story of beginnings.

The Spirit pushes people outward into new places they never imagined going. Wesley’s warmed heart sent him into a ministry that transformed lives far beyond what he could have anticipated. Resurrection itself always seems to lead people somewhere new.

So here I am: standing in the sacred tension between grief and hope, exhaustion and gratitude, endings and beginnings.

Surrounded by boxes.

Holding peonies.

Trusting the Spirit anyway.