This being the west coast of Scotland, where you can easily have four seasons in a day, the weather is always a convenient springboard for something to say when there is no great inspiration in the news. It's also fairly easy to write, as I can get away with little more than paraphrasing the Qur'an, and then take all the credit for God's insight.

It's that time again, when an early start means scraping frost off the windscreen. There's awful warnings of black ice on the roads, and freezing winds howling down from the Arctic. One minute you're noticing the autumn colours in the leaves, and in the blink of an eye it's suddenly another Scottish winter.

It was a very different situation when Qur'an was revealed, in a desert community more likely to suffer drought than snow, so when mentioning precipitation it only mentions rain, and 1000 years before Shakespeare compares God's Mercy with rainfall, giving life to a parched dry land.

But as with all the signs of God, what is beneficent when gentle can be terrifying when seen as a manifestation of God's power, a storm at sea or a flood sweeping all before it. The signs of God, their beauty and magnificence can fill us with wonder and delight, but our fragility before their awesome majesty should also fill us with humility and fear.

It's remarkable, really, that in the face of such overwhelming odds mankind can so consistently avoid humility. Talking of taming nature and bending it to our will, as opposed to humble stewardship and gratitude for its bounty; measuring our power in terms of our capacity to destroy ourselves.

This week we've had a glimpse of the power that can be seen in another of God's signs, that is the winds, the spiralling motion in that thin gaseous skin between the earth and sky, which sustains life as we know it. Qur'an speaks of the changing winds bringing good news of future rain, of winds that fertilise the earth, spreading seeds like thistledown, carrying pollen from flower to flower, and their perfume on the air.

But a slight shift in the isobars, and trees are uprooted with the ease that a bonfire's ashes are scattered by a breeze. On those occasions when the forces of nature flex their muscles, mankind's puny efforts to control them are quickly put into perspective.

Qur'an says that God gave Solomon the power to control the winds, but before that, he was given mercy, good judgment, gratitude and humility.