Prayer Tip--The Holy Spirit, The Trinity and the Church

The Nicene Creed names the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life,” and I’ll be honest–of all the truths we proclaim, the Spirit often feels the hardest to grasp. I can picture the Father, I can walk with Jesus through the Gospels, but the Spirit? Sometimes I struggle to understand who the Spirit is or how the Spirit works. Yet even in that struggle, I’ve never doubted the Spirit’s presence. I’ve felt it in those moments when something shifts inside me–when bitterness suddenly gives way to compassion, when I find words I didn’t know I had, when courage appears from nowhere to do what needs doing. These aren’t self-generated transformations; they’re evidence of what the Creed means by “giver of life”–not just biological existence, but the kind of life that carries meaning, connection, and purpose. The Spirit remains beautifully mysterious to me, but undeniably real.

The Creed continues, telling us this same Spirit “has spoken through the prophets,” and here’s where things get personal.  The Spirit still speaks, still disrupts, still refuses to be tamed. I think about Pentecost, how those first believers must have felt when the Spirit arrived, not with gentle whispers but with wind and fire and words they didn’t plan to say. They couldn’t control what was happening, couldn’t predict the outcome, they could only receive what was given. This same Spirit who turned frightened disciples into bold witnesses still moves among us today–wonderfully uncontrollable, like wind that blows where it chooses, fire that can’t be contained, water that finds its way through every defense we construct. The challenge is learning to pay attention, to notice those unexpected moments when the Spirit breaks through–the conversation that takes a surprising turn toward healing, the inexplicable peace in the middle of chaos, the sudden clarity about what needs to be done. The council of Nicaea knew they were trying to describe something essentially beyond description: a God who shows up in the colleague who needs encouragement, who whispers through the stranger who needs our help, who nudges us toward the family member we’ve been avoiding. “We believe,” we say together, and in that communal declaration, we join those first disciples at Pentecost, not fully comprehending but absolutely certain that the God who breathed life into creation still breathes through us, still moves in ways that transcend our understanding, still transforms the ordinary into the sacred.