The Holy Spirit is a direct challenge to any notion that we have about the limits of God. Whenever we try to draw boundaries around who God is or the way God acts, or whenever we try to claim that God's revelation to our world might be complete, the Holy Spirit raises an eyebrow at us and gives a good little chuckle.

Last week, the author Rachel Held Evans published a blog post entitled "Is God's presence limited to Scripture?" in response to a piece she had read which claimed that Scripture is the boundary that God has drawn around himself, and that anything beyond Scripture is to be rejected as mysticism. In this post she writes,

From the events of Pentecost, to the practices of communion and baptism throughout Christian history, to the writings and teachings of the desert fathers and mothers, to the Reformation, to the divine offices being prayed continually throughout the world today, to the Azusa Street revival, to the spread of Christianity in the global South and East, the story of Christianity is the story of regular people connecting in powerful ways to the presence of God....

As Peter exclaimed at Pentecost, “you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for your and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

The Holy Spirit has sustained the Church through good times and bad, through persecution and imperial power, through the centuries before the Christian Bible was fully assembled, through the assembling of that Bible, through the centuries when most Christians had very little access to the Bible, through the centuries when many American Christians have multiple versions of the Bible on their bookshelves and multiple Christian denominations in their hometowns.

And as Jesus told Nicodemus, “the wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

In other words, the Holy Spirit doesn’t have boundaries.

Where in your own life have you experienced the limitless blowing of the Spirit? In what ways have you tried to draw boundaries around God? In what ways have those boundaries shifted or crumbled through the course of your faith journey?