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.
Conversion: Embraced by Love
This four-part podcast explores the conversion experiences of three local Catholics and is a production of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and The Catholic Spirit. It is made possible by a grant from 1891 Financial Life, where “the heart of our work is the heart of your world.” Listen Now
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.
“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 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.”
Conversion: Embraced by Love
This four-part podcast explores the conversion experiences of three local Catholics and is a production of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and The Catholic Spirit. It is made possible by a grant from 1891 Financial Life, where “the heart of our work is the heart of your world.” Listen Now
