I know the love of God the most when it rains. As a little girl in the Pacific Northwest, before I knew about bad things beyond a scraped knee, it rained. It was a consistent rhythm, and I was a sponge for it as the nostalgic walls of childhood innocence were building up deep in the recesses of my memory.
Rain promised to wash away gross things, and make plants green, and enable me to make mud pies outside when it finished. When I first came to know those now deep and familiar aches of loneliness or misunderstandings, it rained — and it felt like such a mercy that the outside world could match my insides for a while.
Watching the rain lit up in me a kind of awe that lifted my face toward Someone bigger than anyone else — no one could make it rain but Him. When it rains, I think these are the things I come awake to, again: consistency and purity; a sense of feeling known for a moment; the sovereignty of God. A sense of safety even when I still feel sad, and alone, and misunderstood. A little girl comes awake within me a bit, the one I knew before she found out about bad things.
Moving to California was hard on my faith, even at just ten years old. It was hard to know God’s love in chronic drought and what felt like perpetual summer.
Dry ground. Dry air. Dry skin. Gross things left out to crust over in shame and exposure. A heart aching to weep and be met with a matching downpour and left with only the memory.
Almost seventeen years later, I still know the love of God most when it rains. But I also know it now when I turn my face toward the sun in the morning, like the cosmos in my garden. I know it in the summer sunsets behind the regality of the Valley’s oak trees. I know it in the dry ground, the dry air, the dry skin that wraps around holding and protecting my weak body.
It turns out that when everything’s left out to dry, you’re forced to look at the dust and vapor that’s left and take a resigned breath to look at the One who offers Living Water, a kind that won’t leave me out to dry but promises to wash away the gross things I’m ashamed of and turn them into new life, leading me back to that little girl who knows the consistent rhythms of God.
I think of Daniel chapter 3 – Israel is in exile in the kingdom of Babylon, and the king has decreed that everyone of every nation and language shall bow down and worship his golden statute when they hear the music play; to refuse meant to be thrown into a furnace of blazing fire. Three Jews the king had appointed to manage the province of Babylon had refused to worship the statue — their allegiance was to the God of Israel alone, and they were willing to risk their lives for saying so.
In his fury, the king threw the three into the fiery furnace — dry, perpetual heat. The three had been bound up, and the furnace so hot that the flames that escaped its mouth burned up the men who carried the Jews to their death. Then, the king saw not three, but four men walking around inside the furnace unharmed, “the fourth looking like a son of the gods” (v.25). The king called the three Jews to come out, and when they did, not one hair on their whole bodies had been burned. The king gave praise to the God of Israel and rewarded the three men.
The love of God lives in the dry, fiery places, too — because the God who is love draws close and stays, even in a fiery furnace, even in chronic drought.
I’m reminded of my heroes throughout history, the ones who knew the fire and found God there, declaring with their lives how much better the cost was to give their allegiance to Him than the Babylon of their day:
- Perpetua and Felicity
- St. Lucia
- Hilda, Abbess of Whitby
- Catherine of Siena
- Corrie ten Boom
- Elisabeth Elliot
- and so many more
I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me back then that God’s love could be found in a perpetual summer.
But I’ve tasted and I’ve seen the Life that comes through seasons, and I know now that the only perpetual thing in the Universe is Him.
Soli Deo Gloria.
On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.” He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit…
John 7:37-39 CSB
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