No Rain

My daughters and I huddled close.  We were walking down the road on a beautiful summer night when a gentle rain began to fall.  We were closely knit together under our one umbrella.  We had to move in unison if we were going to move at all.  

My youngest daughter reached out her hand to touch the drops and then she stared straight up.  She said, “Mama, there is no rain under here.”  

I thought this was obvious and unimportant and the very significance of using an umbrella.  And yet the matter of this simple fact caused me to see something I had been missing for far too long.  

For just over a year, my life has felt random, uncontrolled and unpredictable.  I traced back in my mind, my daddy died thirteen months ago.  I have now traveled every holiday without him.  I navigate a company in which he mentored me for twenty-five years without him.  Two of my children graduated this year, without him and now one will move across the country and he won’t be there to tell me this is exactly how it should be.  

And although I know God is faithful and true.  And although I feel Him loving me fiercely and showing up in my loneliness and occasional despair, I have chosen to focus on the rain outside the umbrella instead of the cool, dry place underneath.

You see we cannot predict the rain.  The weatherman will tell us almost to the minute when it will start and when it will stop, but he doesn’t know the size of the drops nor how many puddles will form on my porch.

But God does.  

He also knows underneath the umbrella, rain cannot fall.  It cannot dampen my clothes or fill my shoes.  So it is with God.

If I truly give Him control.  If I truly believe in His goodness and His uncanny ability to show up then rain in the form of hope draining despair cannot descend.

It is where we choose to look.

Outside we stare at the random, frantic pattern of life.  Inside, underneath,  we find the precise nature of a peace giving God.