The Rain has come...

The Rains…

Monday morning – 2AM

Having fallen asleep to the sound of winds assaulting the various flags at the Bible Centre where I’m teaching this week, I wake to the sound of raindrops pelting the flat roof that extends right outside my open window as the skies, pregnant with moisture, give birth to long awaited showers. I smile and turn over, drifting quickly into contented sleep.

6AM

As light dawns, I waken slowly to the sound of wind, once again, gently caressing the flags, but also to the sound of birds. Gulls and geese are celebrating the rain with me, down on the field by the water, presumably feasting on the harvest that comes from a newly watered earth. Beyond the field, the sound. Beyond the sound, the mountains, with clouds captured by their walls, watering thirsty cedars.

Welcome rain. When last you left us, some 80 days ago, I didn’t know you’d be gone so long, didn’t know I’d miss your mists so much. Only your return awakens my slumbering longings for you, and all the beauty, cleansing, and contemplation that comes when you wash the earth, fill the seas, cleanse the souls. Welcome rain.

I ponder, as the clouds drift across their mountain canvass, the rains spoken of by Hosea. Our world gets parched, terribly so, by the absence of spirit, because sans spirit, we’re stripped of beauty, justice, hope, rest, joy. The dessert landscape of our parched souls is sparse, and we’re wearied by the looking, settling for substitute versions of life, in a dry barren land. Television and money, indulgences and diversions, ambitions and acquisitions, these become our food, bending our appetites towards destruction. Worst of all, our appetites adapt.

And then the rains come, and we realize that we’ve been feasting on dirt, realize that abundant streams await, from which we might imbibe hope, simplicity, hospitality, generosity.

Come Holy Spirit. Pour your rain on my soul this day. Saturate me with your life, that my appetites for life might be awakened, that rivers of living water might flow through me. I thirst. I thirst.