THE LATTER RAIN

A Drink of Living Water

This is from June 1, 2009, but I just came across it again today, July 14, 2014.

The Latter Rain

I was just in Washington, D.C. for the two week Doctorate of Ministry session at Wesley Seminary, and was very happy to be there when the azaleas were blooming.

Nevertheless, at times in the past few years it has been very difficult for me to be there in certain ways.  One of the problems is that I always have a list of friends 

I would like to see, but often I am able to visit with many fewer friends than those on my whole list.  

Since early May when I drove up there, however, I was blessed to be able to visit with many friends and family members from Washington, D.C. to Falls Church, 

Vienna, Yorktown and Chesapeake, Virginia; to Charleston, South Carolina.

Then, because of some car trouble over the weekend, I was blessed to meet some very helpful people and some who were eager to share stories of faith.  What a joy that was even though my trip was not going as I had planned!

I am finally very happy to be with Krista and her family near Marietta, Georgia

on my way back to the central west coast of Florida where my parents and my sister and her family live.  

I treasure every visit, and am very glad that while I was in Washington, I was able to touch base with two dear friends I hadn’t seen in ages.  

One was a fellow colleague in ministry who had taken part in the Urban Ministry Track 

at Wesley Theological Seminary with me.  

The other was a dear friend whom I met three weeks before Krista was born --

thirty-seven years ago -- on the day I found out that my mother’s father had passed away.  

While visiting with her, I was reminded of the late winter rains in Central Illinois where we lived in Married Student Housing, some apartments on the edge of the cornfields on the outskirts of the main campus of the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

During those late winter days, dark gray relentless overcast of clouds, accompanied by heavily dripping, cold rain were common there in the early 1970s.  

As a matter of fact, if you look up a definition for the word “dreary” in certain dictionaries, you might find the extra reference, “Go to spend some time in Central Illinois in late winter.”  

That particular day in the first week of March, 1972, matched the description completely.  

The barren fields of the South Farms of the University of Illinois tucked in the Orchard Downs, Married Student Housing Apartments on the south and west sides.  The northern border was a sedate neighborhood with beautiful full-grown trees favored by many faculty members of long-standing.  And the eastern border was a newer part of town where younger faculty members lived, sometimes in houses designed by avant garde architects.

As usual for that time of year, the prevailing winds bringing in new weather systems were beginning to shift from the wintertime north or west to almost exclusively from the west.  

Soon the intermittent thunder storms of late winter and early spring would begin, with thunder clouds booming their way across from the central plains of the U.S. 

My kids' father was my husband at the time.  We could often hear the sounds of the storms growing in intensity for up to an hour or so before they came swiftly crashing over our heads.  Then at times he and I would awaken to a loud noisy crack that seemed about to break open the flat gravel-covered roof of our apartment on the top floor of a two storied red brick building.  The first extremely loud boom would startle us out of sleep.

At first the storms were terrifying to me. 

However, when we had become accustomed to the noise, and when we came to know the normalcy of the visitation of those late winter and early spring storms, we actually began to enjoy them.  

When the sound of the thunder woke us up, we would wait out the storm by counting the time between the lightning flashes and the rolling thunder.  You can tell how close the storm is getting when the time between the flash and the boom and roar of thunder are less time apart.

If we were awake enough to go into the living room, the lightning was visible on the edges of the open spaces between the slats of the Venetian blinds over the windows.  

Even though the frame of the bedroom window was decorated by curtains, the fabric was sheer enough to allow the light to shine through.  The apartment was furnished, but we had bought the bedroom curtains at a discount store with the money from inside our wedding cards, along with a bucket a mop, and many other household items not fit for fancy wedding wrapping paper.

  

In the dark of night, my husband and I would first become aware of the coming storm when we heard the distant rumblings echoing across the nearly flat land 

to the west of us -- the great prairies of the central United States, vast plains interrupted by rivers and only some occasional rolling hills. 

The noise of the thunder came first without any light that was visible.  

Then, the closer the storm system came to us, the light flashes became brighter as we counted an ever decreasing space of time between the sounds and the light.  

We counted, “One one thousand, two one thousand. . .”  

And we imagined that maybe we could hear the thunder all the way from when the storm was roiling over the Mississippi River on Illinois’ western border with Missouri and Iowa.  But probably we could only hear its noisiness from somewhere east of the Sangamon River that wends its way through Illinois’ capital, 

Springfield, a bit more than a hundred miles away from Champaign-Urbana.

By the time the sounds of thunder and reality of the lightning flashes were almost simultaneous, we often gave up trying to sleep and went into the living room to watch the powerful display of nature from the big picture window.  

As the storm system majestically passed us, moving on toward the edges of the plains 

in western Indiana, we marveled at the magnificent lightning displays. 

By the time our living room window lent a frame to the beauty and wonder of the power of the storm, we saw the jagged lights flashing just ahead of our ability to hear the sounds of the tremendous thunder boomers.  

Our living room window faced south, so as we watched and listened to the last of the thunder storm sweep past us to the left, we often wondered how far it still had to go.  

The system might break up as the plains ended in central and eastern Indiana.  

Or maybe the deluge would lose its power as it reached the approach to the Appalachian Mountains in southeastern Ohio.  

The towering cumulus clouds might also completely be delivered of their life-giving fresh water along the way, and die out, never to disturb the sleep of the ever-increasing populations further east of central Ohio.

Those late winter and early spring rains prepared thousands of hectares of fields for spring plows, making the dark rich soil ready to receive corn kernels, soy beans, barley pearls, hayseed and ears of various grains.   

The soil of the truck gardens, the farmers’ wives gardens, and the orchards would be well-watered, too.  

And as the seasons changed, their bountiful vegetables and fruits found their way to tables in rural areas, in small towns and in cities of all sizes either as fresh, canned or dried products. 

Or the grains fed farm animals in the area, or were made into cereals, baked goods and other products for people near and far.

I can still remember growing up in Chicago and seeing the huge and numerous grain elevators at the inland port on Lake Michigan, the big ocean-going grain barges pulled up to the docks, their holds open to the siphon tubes from the elevators.

Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD:  

his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, 

as the latter and former rain unto the earth.  [Hosea 6:3]