Another rainy day in…

San Diego? Yes, I guess that is right. It just feels so odd to say. I love the rain though. It feels special to get it here. It is such a nice change. I understand we have beautiful weather but you can’t really appreciate it without some “bad” or “stormy” weather. My favorite is the day after it’s rained. Everything feels so fresh, new and clean.  Those are the days when I can so easily understand - The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;great is your faithfulness.”The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,”therefore I will hope in him.” – Lamentations 3:22-24

All this thinking about how we perceive “good” and “bad” weather got me thinking about it on all levels.

Do we really understand God’s perfect goodness and love without the experience of ugliness? I think that is why when we embrace the unlovely (like Christ did) or even bad weather we find beauty in it. C.S. Lewis puts it like this “God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love of goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designed for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ectasy of love and delight compared with which the most raptuours love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free. 

…If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will – that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings – then we may take it it is worth paying.”

I embrace the rain because I know that it is the lens that reveals the true beauty of new life. I know it’s needed.