. :: Pray for Rain

Pray for Rain

Rush hour. A calamity of too many cars going in too few directions in too short a time. The bedroom suburbs belch their contents onto the highways and byways that lead to towers of offices and fields of factories. At the end of the day, weary workers, like so many salmon (if not lemmings), laboriously exert our way back to our daybreak origins. Except for the odd national holiday, no metropolitan highway in America is safe from this weekday cycle of life – still life. It is the nature of work in our culture. Our days are filled with our best efforts to earn the living that supports our lifestyle. No one sends us a check for sitting at home watching the grass grow so we commute, compute, and commute again.

I wonder? How many of we road-warrior commuters are praying for rain.

I wonder? Is the most important thing in our lives even on our minds? Have we maintained any connection between our livelihoods and the very fountain of living water?

The American economy has burgeoned in the last fifty years as we migrated from an agriculturally based economy to manufacturing, then service, and now an information processing based economy. Small country towns that once thrived on the local agriculture are now virtual ghost towns. Other small towns have evolved into bustling suburbs as the focus of our economy and the locus of our dwelling has placed us far away from the place where our breakfast, lunch, and dinner is grown. Is anyone praying for rain?

“One Kansas farmer feeds 128 people... and You!”

This road sign is snuggled between a wheat field and a barnyard in central Kansas. I love the sign, but it is terribly misplaced. I’d like to see that sign on an interstate in suburban Kansas City, or painted on the side of a warehouse in Los Angeles, or even broadcast as a public service announcement on a New York City television station. People need to be reminded that their food comes from somewhere beyond the grocery store shelf. People need to pray for rain.

As I was recently driving across those Kansas wheat fields, I listened to a favorite artist of Alyse’s and mine, Nanci Griffith. Nanci seems to hold similar awareness that the children of the suburbs are unaware of their dependence upon blessed rain:

Trouble In The Fields
(Nanci Griffith)

Baby I know that we've got trouble in the fields
When the bankers swarm like locust out there turning away our yield
The trains roll by our silos, silver in the rain
They leave our pockets full of nothing
But our dreams and the golden grain
Have you seen the folks in line downtown at the station
They're all buying their ticket out and talking the great depression
Our parents had their hard times fifty years ago
When they stood out in these empty fields in dust as deep as snow

(chorus)
And all this trouble in our fields
If this rain can fall, these wounds can heal
They'll never take our native soil
But if we sell that new John Deere
And then we'll work these crops with sweat and tears
You'll be the mule I'll be the plow
Come harvest time we'll work it out

There's still a lotta love, here in these troubled fields
There's a book up on the shelf about the dust bowl days
And there's a little bit of you and a little bit of me
In the photos on every page
Now our children live in the city and they rest upon our shoulders
They never want the rain to fall or the weather to get colder

One dark and stormy night, I walked into a restaurant and asked to be served. While waiting for a table for ten to open up, the hostess made conversation with me by suggesting that the weather was very poor outside. I said that I thought the weather was great. She said, “Oh, you like this weather?”

“I like to eat,” I responded, “and I hope that the farmers who grew the food I am going to eat here tonight got some of this ‘poor’ rainy weather. . . . Don’t you?”

Start with the right attitude

Perhaps worse than being ignorant of our dependence upon rain, we live in a culture that despises rain. Weather forecasts tells us how long the bright, sunny “good” weather will last until interrupted by rainy, stormy “bad” weather. This is a symptom of the fatal disease of self-reliance.

He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45 NAS)

This verse is a good illustration of the flip-flop we have suffered in our “rain consciousness.” We tend to think “sun good / rain bad.” But this verse argues that God causes the sun to rise on the evil... as well as the good and He sends rain on the righteous... and the unrighteous, too. Yes, this verse is primarily referring to God’s sovereignty over creation, but in it Jesus also reveals Palestinian way of thinking that scorching sun is typically the plight of evil doers and rain is the reward of the righteous. Many readers will remember this line from an old hymn:

He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
that shadows a dry thirsty land

If you live in a “dry thirsty land,” you live with expectancy for the rains of heaven. Although the land of Israel is the context of writings of scripture, all of us live in such a land. Without rain, we are all doomed to a short, agonizing death in the desert.

Worse than neglecting the importance of rain to ability to live, we have neglected the source of rain as well. Hear God’s words that echo through the centuries, "My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:13) Our first problem, in God’s eyes, is that we neglected to remain in dependence upon Him, and then we compounded the problem by deluding ourselves into thinking that we could provide water for ourselves.

Wise and productive farmers for millennia have irrigated their fields when rain was in short supply, but those wise farmers also know that rain is necessary to replenish whatever reservoir from which they draw their irrigation water. I can tell you for sure, farmers never cease to pray for rain. At best, the rest of us merely pray that farmers pray for rain. Any society that collectively ceases to pray for rain is a society that has become detached, and perhaps, lost its faith in the Giver of rain.

The importance of rain is heightened as we understand how God illustrates His involvement with us through it. Consider Isaiah’s conviction about rain: "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there without watering the earth, and making it bear and sprout, and furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; So shall My word be which goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding {in the matter} for which I sent it.” (Isa 55:10-11 NAS)

Poor weather!! Through Isaiah, God reveals that the productivity, the sheer necessity of His word is understood by observing the necessity of rain. If we cannot bring ourselves to pray for rain, we are not likely to bring ourselves to pray for the prevalence of His Word.

And if you don't believe me....

Here is an interesting thought from a popular NASACR driver, Jimmy Spencer:
source

Q: What's your take on the amount of bad weather that's affected the early part of the NASCAR season? You're a gardener, so you must be all over it.
A: We've had an excessive amount of rain in the Charlotte area -- I don't know how many days. But it is good. The whole south has been devastated by drought for the past few years, so the rain has been beneficial for that. It has hampered the racing, but it hasn't really affected the schedule to the point where it's caused us any real trouble, yet. As long as it doesn't that's OK and we'll just keep doing this rain dance and hope that it rains just enough and we can keep getting our races in on Sundays.

Q: Does this prove that there's more important stuff going on than just racing?
A: Too many people don't believe in God, but I do. I believe there's a God up there and He controls most of this stuff that's going on, believe me. The devil's working against Him, but He knows we needed the rain and He put it there for us. If you don't think there's a God, just wake up in the morning and watch the sun come up, or watch a flower bloom over the period of a couple days. It's incredible. There's a lot higher power than we can account for.