Love & Rain

     Out of angry skies, the rain comes down in torrents. This much water falling to the earth makes one wonder how it could be held high above in clouds we fly through with airplanes. It seems as if clouds should be like fish tanks or those galvanized troughs, solid objects holding gallons upon gallons. Today God left the spigot open.  Sitting in the quiet of the house the rain demands attention. Her music is all around me in Dolby surround sound, in the gurgling of the gutters and pinging off the screens and the deeper notes as the deluge hits the shingles on all the angles of the roof.  It is too early in spring to have the rain barrels hooked up otherwise I know that sound too would be part of the symphony. When the barrels are another instrument they are not part of the rhythm section. The sound stands out like a piccolo because the splash of the water into the barrel or the sound of the overflow pouring out of the barrel cuts through the melodic rhythm of the drops on the shingles or the gurgling in the gutters.  The sound is often loud enough to make someone in the house wonder if a stream had found its way into the house and that somewhere in the sunroom there is a waterfall cascading from one floor to the next.  
     Rain is akin to love in the sense that when we want to be washed with it, dripping and covering us, we don’t just welcome it, we adore it. We relish in it like rain falling in the Arizona desert. A love that is wanted and welcomed can be all-consuming. It can be heavy and constant and take over our day and we welcome that blanket of love.
     But if we do not welcome love, like the rain on a 35-degree day in April, we are repulsed by it. We throw up our hands and wonder why we must endure this torture.  But in that moment we need to remember the hot, dry afternoon of late July as the corn barely moves in the whisper of a breeze and the hay in the field waits patiently for a drink. And we must recall the rain barrel standing nearly empty that same day as the tomatoes in the garden swallow the dust from the dogs running past in the brown grass. On that day when we look to the sky for a sign of rain and we sigh and hope for just a small shower, we don’t think of April.