More than 50 years later, Mendota Heights man vividly remembers first experiencing Christ’s love

By Joe Ruff

The Catholic Spirit

Jerry Wind, 71, vividly remembers driving home from a house party his first year in college after he declared — to himself, aloud — “I don’t want to live this way anymore. This is not freedom.”

He grew up in a strong Catholic family, members of St. Bernard in St. Paul. But he had gone off course in his last year and a half in high school — drinking, partying, regularly using marijuana and other drugs, gambling, pouring his money into his car and trying to impress others. He didn’t like himself.

At the same time, he had begun to break away from those activities. Not having attended Mass for about three years, he had gone back to the liturgy, and he prayed more. He received some grace from God in those moments of prayer, but it was a “bargain counter” relationship, Wind said, in which he promised to go to church and stop certain behaviors, but he expected something from the Lord in return.

At the house party, some friends shared an article they were writing on freedom. Something in him snapped. He realized he hadn’t been living in freedom, but under the tyranny of others’ opinions, trying to enjoy things he had stopped enjoying. He wanted more out of life.

“I was angry at the world and angry at myself, maybe working too hard at being accepted by my crowd. I went home,” Wind said. “On my way home in the car, God’s power just poured out on me. I experienced the power of God like I never knew it existed, the love of Christ. And I consider that night in January 1970, I was 18 years old, that was my baptism in the Holy Spirit.”

Asked what it was like, there in the car, Wind said it was a flood of God’s love. Did he stop the car?

“No, not anything like that,” Wind said. “Leaving the party was my decision. I was going to live for Christ. And I experienced a flood of the Holy Spirit. I was in relationship with God. Before that, I knew about God. I knew about Jesus. After that, I knew Jesus. And when I say a flood of God’s love, well, I had tears. But I also had anger. He just met me right where I was at.”

Not everything fell into place at once. But it was a start, Wind said.

Sinchi was helping to lead Alpha, and that, rosary, Mass, confession and first forays adoration of the Eucharist, led her to a 2017 pilgrimage to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, which traces its roots to Pittsburgh. The included a stop at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio. day at Steubenville, with a group of about 30 a small chapel in prayer and adoration, Spirit really hit me,” Sinchi said. “It’s hard describe. Struggling with my parents, hatred in My family was just a disaster. I was a mess. broke down (crying) for the first time. (from the crowd) had come up to me and ‘Jesus told me — he wants you to know — that you.’ so simple, but intentional,” Sinchi said. “I felt this fire. I felt his love. I was there for people prayed over me. I didn’t ask for it. just saw me suffering, and they prayed over then, I know what Jesus’ love is like,” said. “And I never, ever want to be away from again. Granted, I’ve fallen so many times then. But his grace has remained. Adoration meant so much to me. And worship. When I music about Christ, it’s all real. It’s all beautiful.

I know that’s what it will be like in heaven. Every time I fall, I go back to that occasion, when he picked me up out of my sin, and wanted to love me. And hold me.”

Her life changed in big ways from that day forward, Sinchi said. She has forgiven and is working to reconcile with her parents. She and her daughter, MaryJose, now 16 and a sophomore at Chesterton Academy in Hopkins, have grown close.

“Our relationship has changed dramatically in six years,” Sinchi said of her daughter. “Learning about Christ, I am sharing it with her. She is the most amazing person. The Lord gave her to me for a reason. Having her is an amazing gift.”

Now attending St. Mark in St. Paul, Sinchi said she has gravitated away from helping lead groups like Alpha to forge a quieter home life, the “domestic Church,” something to which she feels called. “I love confession every Sunday,” Sinchi said. “The grace that God gives me and my family. It’s not something you take lightly.”

Sinchi also wants to share with others the love that Christ has shown her.

“If I have that, and can expand that love for Jesus, knowing what I was, and the potential that I have, I want to share that,” she said. “I want to share that with everybody. I am so grateful.”

“After that night, I couldn’t stop reading the Bible and I returned to Mass every week, returned to the sacraments and said my rosary on the way out to school in my car,” he said. “It was over a year later that I went to my first (charismatic) prayer meeting and heard the term, ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit.’”

Knowing he had to continue making positive choices, he paid a visit to his teachers in community college.

“I was getting two Fs and had high-level freshman classes,” Wind said. “I went in to each teacher and said, ‘I gave my life to God. And I’m not going to flunk your classes.’ Those two Fs became Cs, and the two Ds became Bs. Later, I graduated magna cum laude at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.”

With degrees in education and English, Wind taught for several years. In 1980, he founded a house painting business he still runs, Painting by Jerry Wind. He and his wife, Susan, were members of Nativity of Our Lord in St. Paul until they moved in recent years. Now, they are members of St. Peter in Mendota. They have four children and nine grandchildren. He expects to retire soon and is making plans for his business to continue after he leaves. Business and health challenges have swept into his life as they do for many others, Wind said. His faith has kept him going. Wind said his life began taking shape at college as he lived out his conversion. At one point, he turned to the Lord, saying, “I need to meet some Christian friends.” That same day, he met a “little guy with long hair.”

“I had kind of long hair, too,” Wind said. “He had all these buttons on, ‘Join the Jesus Revolution’ and all this stuff, and his name was Gary. And I started talking to him and telling him we had a very similar past. We’re talking about how much we love the Lord and how we met him. I had to go to class, so I went to class. I came back, and he was talking to another

MEISHA JOHNSON CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

I knew who my Savior was. I knew who had reached out to me that day in my living room and I slowly began to understand why. I started to love the salvation story. But being that I was still a newborn Christian, I was far from having all the answers.”

Inspired by the Bible, Johnson understood that prayer and continued learning about God and the Christian faith had to become part of her everyday life.

“When prayer became a part of my daily routine, all those conversion seeds began to blossom, and I couldn’t get enough. With that blossoming came discernment, and with discernment came a different worldview, which I now know as a sacramental worldview. But at the time, I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening to me. The only thing I knew for certain was something in my soul was changed. For the first time, my life was being led entirely by God.”

Johnson said the Lord seemed to be telling her during those early years of conversion, “‘I am going to show you your next steps. I won’t lay it all out perfectly for you. You’ll have to have faith. I’m going to call you somewhere and you’re going to have to trust me.’”

That led to a 21-day Daniel Fast in 2014, giving up choice food and drink, while devoting extra time to a specific prayer request. Johnson’s worries at that time included the financial strain of working as an independent contractor and as a single mother of two.

Forty-eight hours after that fast concluded, Johnson received a telephone call from a Phoenix news agent she didn’t know, and who didn’t know her, telling her that a Philadelphia television news outlet (CBS-KYW) had asked about her. “Meisha,” Johnson said the agent told her, “never in my career as a news agent have I seen this. A top-five news station in Philadelphia just called me inquiring about you for a job opportunity.”

Months of prayer and negotiation followed, and Johnson was offered an on-air reporting job in 2015. Through prayer and support from her family, she moved to Philadelphia. “This was my first real test of stepping out into the unknown and trusting God, even though I had no idea what he was doing,” Johnson said. The move across state lines, while clouded with many challenges, proved to be the biggest opportunity for her to grow in relationship with God, she said. It was a move that would ultimately equip and embolden her to change careers entirely.

After three years on the East Coast, rather than renew her TV news contract, Johnson felt compelled to return to the Midwest and study the Bible. Not understanding the differences among Christian denominations, she enrolled at Bethel University in St. Paul, an evangelical Christian school. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in Christian ministries and biblical studies. It was there that God revealed to her that she was Catholic, at heart and in principle.

“While I was at Bethel, the journalist in me kept asking questions like, well, what happened (in history) before that? Well, what happened before that? And while asking those questions, I was led to Catholicism. It was there I found myself; I found that I was Catholic through and through.”

Another stint in college followed. Wanting to study the fullness of Church history, Johnson enrolled in a Catholic sacred theology program online at St. Joseph’s College in Maine. She graduated with a master’s degree in sacred theology in February 2022. Currently, Johnson is pursuing a doctorate in Catholic ministry through Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America.

“I want to spend my life now sharing what God does in our lives, how he loves us, and what happens when we love him in return,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s sharing has impacted her family and friends, including her parents; Dian joined the Catholic Church in 2021 and Paul was recently baptized.

“We have a huge responsibility to reach out to the people around us who don’t know God or about his salvific mission,” Johnson said. “There are so

JERRY WIND CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 guy. His name was Hal. And so, Hal and I became friends. His sister told us about some Catholic Charismatic Renewal prayer meetings, and she said, ‘Well, the people there are crazy, but so are you, so you should go.’ And there were people raising their hands and praying in tongues, and there was teaching about following Jesus and a lot of people who had met the Lord personally. At that time, the Charismatic Renewal was very young and people looked at it with much skepticism. Of course, now there’s hundreds of millions of Catholics as well as other denominations involved in Catholic Charismatic Renewal all over the world, and it has papal recognition.”

Wind is a member of People of Praise, a Christian charismatic community with about 20 branches across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Hawaii. Involved since March 1971 in Catholic charismatic prayer meetings and conferences in the archdiocese, Wind was a member of Servants of the Lord Community when, in 1985, he joined People of Praise.

Finding the Lord in his own life prompted him to seek others who know Jesus, and to bring Jesus to people who don’t know him at all, Wind said. He has read a lot about the faith, he said. But on one level, that hasn’t led him to love God more. His baptism in the Holy Spirit does that as he continues to follow God each day.

“The Holy Spirit, sometimes … I don’t think he defies reason. I don’t think he’s the opposite of reason. But the things he does seem awful unreasonable to reasonable people. Some reasonable people, they’re afraid of it,” he said. But his experience with the Holy Spirit has led others to know the Spirit, Wind said.

“My mom and dad started to go to prayer meetings in 1971,” he said. “They saw the change in my life. And my sisters, they all came, and they all met the Lord. And all my family and all my kids, we’ve all met the Lord. Jesus works in all our lives.”

This is not something that can be pursued or achieved, but only allowed, Ruff said, and “often those who have had such an experience find it difficult to talk about.” There is no pride in such an experience, he said. Those who have chronicled such changes often describe it as simultaneously confusing, humbling, convicting, reassuring and inviting of response, he said. They are often hesitant to talk about it.

“They always describe it as an out-of-control experience. Always,” Ruff said. “They never describe it as an achievement. They always describe it as a gift. And the other marker I think is hugely important, one of the elements of truth — they’re never proud of it. They are just deeply grateful for it.”

Such conversion stories can serve everyone as an illustration of how God works, Ruff said, even when conversion occurs through more incremental steps into spiritual growth. At some point in everyone’s life, and often at numerous points throughout life, something must change, some self-willed control must be given up, to allow the Holy Spirit to do his work, he said.

“The more dramatic stories of sudden conversion perhaps serve as an example to all of us in our more daily, small surrenders of our egos,” Ruff said. Even a dramatic conversion story such as St. Augustine’s is not completed in the experience. It needs to take root and flower in the embeddedness of community, an extension into service, and a practice of faith that is a continuous, daily surrender, he said.

“Conversion is never self-serving or ego aggrandizing — this would be a counterfeit to its nature,” Ruff said. It also leads the one who has experienced such conversion into community, into greater union and love and service of others, he said.

In his chapter on St. Augustine, Ruff quotes Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the late Pope Benedict XVI): “Conversion does not lead into a private relationship with Jesus, which in reality would be another form of mere monologue. It is the delivery into the pattern of doctrine … or entrance into the ‘we’ of the Church.”

Those who have gone through such dramatic experiences need to be assisted in integrating them, Ruff said. They need to be embedded in community, he said.

“Can our Church welcome such stories?” he asked. “Can it help them take root and find expression in community? Can it offer support and guidance?

“Such stories help me examine my own practices and disciplines as a Catholic,” he said. “Augustine offers me an example, a challenge, but even more an invitation into a more radical surrender into the communion of love.”