Rain Is Good

I once lived in Southern California for almost two years.

There is a hit song from the early 70's, It Never Rains In Southern California.  The song is true.  I think I saw maybe three days of rain out of 600.

It has it's advantages in many ways, but some people get tired of that after a while, as strange as that might seem. Of course, the nearly constant danger of wild fires can be enough to give some homeowners ulcers.

I've lived in Florida most of my life, in various areas, but mostly in the central or southern areas and on both coasts.  Florida may be called the Sunshine State, but it gets plenty of rain.  Rain up here, in the North Georgia mountains is different.  Because we are at about 2,400 feet elevation, often when it is raining, we are in the bottoms of the clouds.  It can be raining very lightly while visibility is maybe a hundred feet or less.  Our back yard gets a temporary waterfall, and streams form on either sides of the steps going down to the front yard.

My crops are getting a good soaking, and anybody who grows any kind of plants outdoors knows that rain has an effect on plants that artificial irrigation just can't match. I know it has to do with ionization and the lightning, etc., but the bottom line is that Adonai created it that way.  Man, with all of his ingenuity can try to imitate the wonderful engineering that he discovers in nature, but he can never quite duplicate it.

Another good thing about rain is that it can redirect your attention.  It rained all day yesterday and might do the same again today.  Yesterday, it meant that Twyla and I spent about two hours in Bible study.  I Samuel to be precise.  We take it slow and carefully.  I have the Hebrew Tanakh (Old Testament to Christians).  It has the Hebrew on the right side and the English translation on the left.  We also use the Hebrew/English Interlinear for further comparison. Then we have the Strong's Concordance to help understand some of the etymology of the words. You would be amazed at the stuff that you miss when you don't know what the original language says.  There is tremendous meaning in the very choice of the words, and how they are strung together. The Jewish sages have understood this for milennia, and it is the basis for the teachings of the Midrash, Talmud and the Kabbalistic writings, which the untrained have no business messing with.  But that's another post.

But my point is that it can be good to have your plans disrupted when it leads to things that draw you closer to the Creator.  Not as YOU think you understand Him or want to understand Him. But how He wants to be understood.  He dictated, (yes, I used that word on purpose) a message over a couple of thousand years, using more than 40 scribes; putting His supernatural fingerprints all throughout it, in order to tell us how we were designed to live and how to be in communion with our Creator.  Human beings royally screw up when they start thinking that they have the wisdom to decide what is right and wrong in their own minds and hearts. Without the objective truth of the ONE who created everything, we are pretty much just floundering around in stupidity.  I love the ending chapters of the book of Job, where Adonai finally speaks.   Go read it, and remember that epistemology is a good thing to understand. In other words, "How do you know what you know?"  A lot of people believe a lot of garbage that just isn't so, because they've never been educated how to think using logic and reason.

This is of such importance at this time in America's history that I think I shall post on the subject soon.

Shalom.