Over the past few weeks it has rained a lot. And over the past two days it has rained to the point that flooding is becoming a problem. I just looked at an image of the radar and it looks like a giant line of storms will be hitting us sometime during the middle of the night. I suppose we are all thankful for the rain, but there is at least one part of my bus route that is underwater and there may be a few more tomorrow that I cannot reach.
Years ago there was an old I Dream of Jeannie episode in which people started to believe that Major Nelson was able to control the weather. A work colleague asked that he do something about his family farm somewhere in the south, and so Jeannie made it rain. Unfortunately, at some point she forgot to turn off the rain and everything flooded.
It seems like this is how we sometimes think about rain and how we ask for it from God. Here in the plains we can go weeks, even months, with nary a drop of rain, but we continue to pray for how it will quench the fields, the ponds, the streams. And then amazingly God makes it rain...and rain...and rain. We get caught up in a cycle of non-stop storms (especially in the spring) and we often end up with floods or hail or tornadoes that do more damage than the drought.
I used to live on the Oregon coast, and there were two season: wet and dry. Around the middle of October it would start raining, and in the middle of April it would stop. I know it was more complicated than that, but I remember it raining parts of 21 days straight in the middle of winter one time, and how I thought I was going to lose my mind.
As I sit here tonight the thunder keeps rolling around the skies, and the light rain that is falling makes it noises on the window. I enjoy it, but I'm ready for it to be over...there's only so much we really can take, so hopefully they are right and it ends for awhile tomorrow. But hopefully tomorrow won't be the last of it through the summer.
