To Be Like a Raindrop

For eight straight afternoons and evenings violent thunderstorms have possessed the sky over my house with terrifying beauty. The rain falls sometimes soft and silent, sometimes hard and gushing, singing a melody as it falls from the black clouds to nourish then disappear. The lightning bursts forth with pulsating power in its own time, unpredictable, always shocking the senses, nearly always followed by deafening thunder which shakes the very foundations. I watch these storms, letting all my senses absorb the show of power until the clouds move on to the east to expend themselves there.

I am reminded that my call in life is to be like one of those raindrops, always moving lower to nourish, then mysteriously to be invisibly lifted up by the son to do it again. Often I am called to move lower as relational electrical storms rage around me. Jesus said, "...whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must by your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matt. 20:25)

Most often I fail in this call to give myself. I lack both the courage and the power to continually seek the low place the way a raindrop does.

Just last weekend I had a particularly bad time with one of my step kids and spent the next day busying myself as a way of avoiding him. It was at the end of that day that my stepdaughter sought me out to ask "How do you be so nice to B-- when he is so mean to you?" I almost laughed out loud at the irony of her timing. After a moment I mumbled, "I pray- a lot." I think God was trying to get my attention, again. The words that I heard come out of my mouth were to instruct me more than to answer her. I was reminded of a section in Hannah Hurnard's  wonderful feast of a book, Hinds Feet on High Places.

"Come, oh come! let us away--/Lower and lower every day, Oh what joy it is to race/ Down to find the lowest place ...it is only up on the High Places of Love that anyone can receive the power to pour themselves down in an utter abandonment of self-giving."

I pray that God will help me, and you too, climb to the "High Places of Love" with him and give us the "power to pour ourselves down in an utter abandonment of self-giving."