Not many of you probably follow Nebraska football – but if you did, you would know that there is a tradition of releasing red balloons after the first touchdown of a home game. That tradition will stop this year for the first time since the 1940’s. The tradition has long been criticized for its potential environmental impact – but that isn’t what stopped it. What stopped it was a lack of air….particularly, helium.
The Nebraska tradition of releasing red balloons into the air just couldn’t happen if there wasn’t the helium to get those balloons up into the sky. This happened due to a leak of helium at one of the helium processing plants which just let the gas go out into the world without any balloons to hold the gas in.
Our lives are sort of like those Nebraskan red balloons. Without the power of God, without His breath in us – the Holy Spirit – we just can’t go “up”. We can try to inflate the balloons ourselves, much our air doesn’t have the “lift” that His does. We need God to be what fills us.
But God also fills us for a reason. Just like that helium leak, God doesn’t want to just release the Holy Spirit out into the atmosphere. Instead, He wants the Holy Spirit to fill us – the red balloons of His creation – so that being filled, we can be a spectacle that brings joy and peace to many as we point to His Spirit at work in us.
Remember that today you are a red balloon and that you have been filled by God to make a scene.