salvation and dancing in the rain

esterday evening,a long and gentle rain washed several weeks of dust off the surface of our town, and this morning we awoke to glistening vegetation and the fragrance of clear air. It was a baptism of sorts.

It’s often dry here in the early summer. But this year the drought has been harsh. As of the middle of May the Brandon area has received less that 50% of expected rainfall. When that happens, stuff dies. We need water and we need it constantly.

You send showers of rain
to soften the soil
and help the plants sprout.
 Wherever your footsteps
touch the earth,
a rich harvest is gathered. – Psalm 65

The Promised Land from Mt Nebo. “Lovely…”

ISRAEL: One of the things that impressed me the most during our recent visit to Israel was the way that creativity, science, agriculture, hard work and the foundational impulse to take care of a good thing has resulted in such a rich agribusiness in the desert.

Dry land doesn’t do much on its own. Add water and – likely as not – you’ll get mud. But, mix in a little creativity, along with a lot of belief, and a boatload of hard work, then life quite literally takes off.

When Moses stood on top of Mt. Nebo and God let him have a good look at the Promised Land he must have thought,”What? You’ve got to be kidding me. All I see is a lot more rocks and sand.”

But the biblical idea of promise is always dependent on our belief, our obedience and our partnership. We miss the point of God’s plan of salvation when we fail to step into the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and participate in the work God is up to.

Another happy bromeliad

YESTERDAY I wrote about the lengths we go to sometimes to make sure that nothing surprising happens in our lives. And we carry that objective into our spiritual world as well. We try to design our faith in such a way that God doesn’t startle us.

One of the best ways to accomplish such inertia is to cut off the water supply. However, rather than gaining comfort we have created a drought, and long-term drought leads to decay and eventually death. Consequently, rather than a manageable faith we have a fossilized version of what once was. We have a desert.

Too many of our churches have status-quo-ed themselves right into the end stages of life. It’s more than past time for a little rain.

SPIRITUAL RAIN: God will send refreshing spiritual rain, and God will do this sometimes whether we ask or not. So the question becomes, “How do we respond?”

life and refreshment

Today I want to step out into the rain without an umbrella and let it soak me to the core. I want to feel it run down my face so that I can taste it on my tongue. I want to feel the baptism. I want to dance in the rain. I want to celebrate life.

I want to live.

I want the footsteps of God to touch the earth and I want to see a rich harvest (Psalm 65).

I want to dance in the rain with Jesus.