Wednesday, March 22, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
My roof’s got a hole in it and I might drown
I am the resurrection and the life, says the Lord; whoever believes in me will never die.
And the spring rains came. Not monsoon, but an all-day rain, surrendered by the grayed out sky, the cumulus clouds that met each other to make a dreary blanket over all of Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.
The clouds covered all the Midwest, I suppose, but I drove all day through the gray mist that covered those three states. Up at 5:30, big motel breakfast, and then nursing a cup of coffee, I talked to my friend in India at 7 am and headed out for my 539 mile drive. The car was warm and cozy, I listened to audible books from India (Murder in Old Bombay), England (The Life and Times of Prince Albert) and the US/Italy (Soldier of the Great War). I had time to talk with three more friends and to wind my way through the Dallas expressway convolutions and come out the other side, bound like a cannonball picking up speed toward Austin.
I picked up my friend George at his work and we headed for “Backyard,” a group of guys that meet once a month in the backyard to drink a little beer, eat a meal together and share bits of their stories with each other around the fire, around the pool, around a few tables. The rain let up for awhile, then started again.
Along the ways they shall find pasture, on every bare height shall their pastures be. They shall not hunger or thirst, nor shall the scorching wind or the sun strike them. I will cut a road through all my mountains and make my highways level.
George and I remembered rainstorms. Putting up tents, getting drenched at midnight when the tent roof caved in, listening to the droning downpour inside my dad’s machine shed, coming into our dairy barn with twenty Holsteins eating and ready to be milked. Their warm wet bodies and big breath filled the barn while they had their fill of ground corn and alfalfa hay. Music from Lincoln’s WPRC and then Lowell Thomas’ CBS newscast flowed out of the flyspecked tan RCA radio. “Good evening, everybody.”
Lowell Thomas traveled the world and with him, so did we. His broadcasts gave me hope that I might get out into that big world myself someday. “So long until tomorrow,” he told us. We opened the stanchions and the cows backed out and headed through the door. Another group of Holsteins waited to come inside. Out of the rain. Heavy udders ready to be milked.
Sing out, O heavens, and rejoice, O earth. Break forth into song, you mountains. For the Lord comforts his people, and shows mercy.
Back at our apartment, cozy out of the rain, warm here in central Texas compared to Illinois, in a few minutes I’ll finally get to bed. Long day’s journey into night. I remember the opening pages of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. In those old milking days I couldn’t get enough of Ernest Hemingway.
In the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain … At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.
The rain can get to you. First Hemingway’s dad the Oak Park physician and later Ernest Hemingway the writer and fishermen both killed themselves. The rain didn’t stop them, and it kept falling on the hot tin roof. God’s love fell through gentle rainbows upon the place beneath. We will do well to listen, and receive it.
Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.
(Isaiah 49, Psalm 145, John 11, John 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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