Thunderstorms are awesome! One of the simple joys in life for me is an afternoon thunderstorm when we are on vacation in Colorado. You can look out across the mountains and see the clouds starting to gather. It seems like they come from all different directions, collide, and then pour rain down for the next hour or two. The temperature drops about 10-15 degrees and we sit out on the porch and watch the rainfall. After that, the sun begins to break through the clouds and everyone goes back outside to enjoy the rest of the day.
After the rain is gone the roads are full of giant puddles. It seems that one puddle just leads to the next. Small rivers flow out of one and into another. As the sun come out and begins to dry everything off the puddles begin to dissipate. They lose enough water that it shuts off the flow of one puddle to another and pretty soon the road is dry. The thunderstorm is soon forgotten and we wait around for the next day to enjoy another one.
What happens if another one doesn’t come? Right now in the Hill Country of Texas we are in the midst of a huge drought. We have not had significant rainfall in months, maybe even a year now. The surrounding area of San Antonio is dry and brown. We are under constant fire danger warnings, the lakes and rivers are all down and there will be huge watering restrictions once summer comes.
This comes after one of the biggest years of rainfall that South Texas has ever seen. Back in the spring and summer of 2007 we had more rainfall in those few months than ever recorded before. I’m not just talking about thunderstorms here, I’m talking about constant rainfall. It seemed that there wasn’t a day that went by that it did not rain at least a bit, but usually it would pour rain for part of the day. The aquifer was full, the lakes and rivers had abundant water and the entire area was as green as I have ever seen it.
Then, in September of that year the rain just stopped. Since then the drought has been on. And slowly over the next few months the water levels receded and have kept going down since then. It was a very weird transition to say the least. We had gotten so used to the constant rainfall that we just expected it to keep happening. Now, we are just praying that the weather pattern will change and that we can get some relief to the dry conditions.
Early on in my walk with Christ my soul was somewhat like those puddles on the roads in Colorado. There was a constant flow of fresh water coming in. I was learning so much about Christ and who He wanted to be in my life. I would just soak it up and in return what was coming out of my life fed into others as well. If my soul began to dry up I just knew that another rainfall would come in and start the process all over again. It was fresh, it was new and exciting and I had the utmost confidence that it would always be that way.
Through the years I have seen many changes when it comes to my walk with Christ. While the steady rains early on led to a reservoir of faith, knowledge, strength and hope I have gone through many droughts in my spiritual life as well. Through my battle with alcoholism and the toll that it eventually took on me, my reservoir had dropped to a level that probably looked more like a murky swamp rather than a clean lake of fresh water. There was nothing coming in and there was nothing going out.
We all have gone through these situations in our lives. We have gone through many hardships. We have lost friends, lost family members and lost jobs. We have watched marriages crumble, maybe even our own. We have gone through this stuff and wondered what had happened to the faith that we once so strongly held onto. What happened to the constant stream of God in our lives? What happened to the belief that every step we took that God was right there with us?
I believe that many times it’s because we have subtly pushed God out of our lives. We don’t mean to. Life just starts happening, things are going well and we just kind of walk through the motions of our faith. We lose contact with the One who we used to reach out to constantly. He has not left us or forgotten about us. We have pushed him out in the same way that we do family dinners and early bedtimes because our lives get so busy.
Other times I believe that God wants us to go through dry times. It is when we go through these times that we realize there is nothing else we can depend on. The American economy has been hit hard recently. People who used to have a million bucks now have 500 grand. People who used to have 100 now have 50. The wealth and privilege that we have so long depended on as Americans is now spastic and we have no idea what it’s going to look like a year or even a month from now. We can’t depend on what we used to.
It is after these dry times that a rainfall is so wonderfully magnificent. Our souls are filled, our thirst is quenched and we are reminded once again how much we need what we have so long been without. The puddles begin to form and feed each other. The reservoirs rise again and the landscape begins to change.
It is through these times of rain, times of drought and the continual cycle of it all that God’s work is made complete in our lives.