hablando solo

I’m going to stretch an analogy here. Hopefully you follow me. I’m not sure if I even follow this, but it’s a developing idea, and I feel I must share such things in order to refine them, and stretch them, and then, afterwards, paint them. I must share them if they are ever going to find any of their potential beauty.

Shanghai, like Seattle, is a city where it rains often. Strangely enough, though there has been rain each day, I haven’t actually seen it till today, one week into my stay here. It struck me that, as frequently occurs with rain, I couldn’t see it if I looked straight out the office window, but could if I found something against which it was visible. It takes a change in my frame of reference to see it; I can’t look at the sky, or at the whole vast world outside, but instead have to focus on the trees, or the light from a streetlight before I see it pouring down. All throughout the Bible, and in countless hymns and songs, God is compared to rain. Sometimes it seems like we ask and ask that He rain down, and we pray for Him to work, and we don’t see him, and it’s like when you look outside and it’s cloudy in that rain-way and it seems there should be rain, and everything makes sense for rain, but there appears to be none. Maybe, in those moments, when God seems so far away and it’s the exact time when we need Him most to work, and he is nowhere to be found, it simply takes a change in perspective to see how active He really is, right in that moment, just outside the window from where we watch, safe, and warm. Maybe God is raining down on us, even when it seems he is not. Maybe we don’t feel the rain, because we’re not stepping outside. We are so very, very talented when it comes to avoiding the rain. We are so evasive with our umbrellas, our covered walkways, and every kind of shelter; I think we forget that, sometimes, getting caught in the deluge is not such a bad thing.

It’s raining today in Shanghai, and I got wet.