April Showers

By the time you read this, it will be May Day.

We will have had our April showers, and I will be thinking about what and how and when to plant my garden. 

Watching the rain fall outside the window, I have alternately thought about the gloomy children in The Cat in the Hat and that passage from Isaiah about the rain accomplishing the purpose for which it was sent. 

All week, I have had the image of a dark cloud in my mind. In its center and out to its edges, it is dark, heavy, brooding. But, on its edges, shining from beyond it, light illumines its borders and highlights its contours and swoops. 

In the middle of the dark cloud, I am sitting with those Cat in the Hat children, just watching and waiting, fixated on my own dullness, stuck in the heaviness. 

“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day…”

Oh, but on the edges, around the corners, filtering through, the light dispels darkness, turning raindrops into rainbows, warming my insipid skin, as a reminder that even dull rain has a purpose. 

“So shall My word be that goes out from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty…”

It takes rain and light to make a garden grow. 

And as the light grows in intensity, my attention is drawn off of the dark center of the cloud, and I search for the shaft of sunlight I know will break through. My eyes move lazily at first, but the brightness increases with my anticipation, and my gaze darts from one likely break in the clouds to another. Diligent desperation brings me to my feet, and I am no longer dull, bored, or lazy. I am waiting. I am watching.

Jesus once told sleeping disciples to keep watch.

Angels asked them why they were wasting time staring up into the sky. 

When Moses wrote his Psalm of praise, his understanding of God’s light helped him have the correct perspective of the darkness of his own dust. It wasn’t worth looking at.

“Let Your work be shown to Your servants, and Your glorious power to their children.”

Light breaks through. The clouds dissipate. My introspection, my dullness, and my griefs fade as I fade. 

He is standing here.

“The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

I trade grief for joy, uncertainty for faith, despair for hope, ugliness for beauty. I am completely undone, disassembled, and transformed. The rain has accomplished the purpose for which He sent it. 

Jesus didn’t suffer, bleed, or die so that I could sit around mooning about rain clouds. God didn’t raise Him to new life so that I could continue to worship at the altar of Me, Myself, and I. 

He has work for us to do, things He is going to accomplish, and He is inviting us to join Him, tools in hand. 

April showers do bring May flowers, just as He said they would.