What's in Your Balloon?

Here is something you can do if you are bored and searching for some puzzling scientific problem to solve. Go to your local Walmart and buy one their cheapy helium-filled balloons. Take it out to your car and release it so that it floats up against the ceiling of the car. Now drive across the parking lot and hit the brakes. Which direction does the balloon go? Does it go toward the front or the rear of the car. Now accelerate away from the stopped position. Again observe the movement of the balloon. Did it move in the direction that you had assumed it would move. Of course not! If it had, I wouldn't be asking you these dumb questions! But the fact that it did the exact opposite of what you were expecting, and the fact that I am pointing it out to you, means that now you need to figure out why it acts like it does!

I don't want to truncate your thought process as you ponder this phenomenon. But just to direct it slightly -- think about the situation in terms of the "spirit", or the gas, with which the balloon is filled. It is that in-filling spirit that causes the strange reaction of the balloon. And it takes only a small shift of focus to see that this as an analogous situation to what we are called to in the Christian life. Ephesians 5:18 tells us not to be "drunk with wine, in which there is debauchary; but to be filled with the Spirit." This filling causes some rather strange behavior on the part of those filled. Things like not returning evil for evil, going the extra mile, caring about the widow and the orphans -- in short, living in an "Upside-Down Kingdom" as Donald Kraybill wrote in his book many years ago. One can deduce from watching the reactions of the helium balloon what that expanded bag of latex is filled with. And one can also able to detect what the professed "Christian" is filled with when you see their reactions to the circumstances they are hit with. It's not something that can be faked, just like the balloon can't fake what it is filled with. It is obvious from observing the reactions. Two inflated balloons, held upright in an anchoring board, do not look any different than two people sitting side-by-side on a church bench. But release them from their anchor, and suddenly it is completely obvious what they are filled with.

But what is not quite so obvious is the cause of the curious behavior of the balloon that I alluded to above. Why does a helium balloon float to the rear of the car when one hits the brakes? Answering that question required me to rack my brains for several days and even reach out to my engineering professors. (This was back in the days prior to smart phones, so my professors were the best source of insightful information!) But the answer finally dawned on me. A helium balloon will always move toward the less dense air. In the case of the car suddenly coming to a stop, the air in the car has been traveling along with the car as it was moving. But when the car stops, the air continues to move forward, causing it to become more compressed up by the windshield. The balloon naturally floats toward the region of the less dense air at the rear of the car. No magic! Just physics!

Oh! And one final thing to plug into the analogy. A latex balloon filled with helium ends up sinking limply to the ground after several days. The skin of the balloon may look impervious to us. But to the likes of a very tiny helium atom, it is as leaky as our Southern border. Escape is always an option, and the gas slowly leaks out. Our bodies are also leaky "earthen vessels" filled with the Spirit, and we must be mindful to always keep ourselves close to the source of that filling. Fortunately, unlike helium, which comes from the radioactive decay within the earth's lithosphere and is only available as a rare side-product in natural gas production, the source for God's Spirit is inexhaustible!