Rainy nights and street lights

I come home from my fourth worship service on Sunday. It's raining - hard. I'm tired. The rest of the family is watching 'home makeover' downstairs, but I don't know the plight of the family who's being helped, having arrived home too late to catch the plot. There's a better show upstairs anyway.

I sit on the sofa and stare out into the street light, watching the rain as it's captured by the light and falls to ground. There's something incredibly beautiful about it and I'm transfixed. Recollections come easily, of all the times I've sat right here over the past eleven years. This spot in the living has been the place of birthdays and graduations, music making and hospitality, Christmas mornings and laughter. It's been the space for some very good conversations - too many to number: After WTO Seattle, with friends for my 50th birthday, various groups and meetings. Tense moments, difficulties, misunderstandings, frustrations...these have somehow occured more often elsewhere in this house. But as I watch the rain, I realize that this space in our house has been more or less preserved. There's no television in this part of the house - just a piano, guitar, viola. As a result it's the place ofconversation and creativity - both life giving forces.

The years have passed quickly under this streetlight, and many rains have fallen. I sit long enough to ponder - and give thanks for shelter from the storms - enjoyed in every way in this little space, in this little house, on this little street. With enough money, anyone can buy a house. But shelter? Shelter is harder. It doesn't come because one is rich or poor. It comes by other means - by grace. May Christ Himself become to each of us a source of shelter, and may we each find the wisdom to nurture that sense of shelther, fortifying it with the ingredients of grace and peace, as we guard the gifts entrusted to us.