I walk every morning on the highway, where Monday-Friday the school buses, parents, and commuters battle their way to their deadlines at 45 mph. Saturday's traffic is busy, too, but in a different way. Folks on their way to football games, yard sales, shopping, visiting friends, or whatever it is people do keeps the highway pretty busy.
But Sundays are another story. The world seems asleep then. Silent and still. I can walk for an entire hour and sometimes see no one at all. No cars, no one in their yards, no one about.
I've been walking in the rhythm of the week's mornings like this for some time, and I've walked through all sorts of conditions. I've walked when it's sweltering, when it's freezing, in the humidity, in the dark, in the fog. Usually when the weather is wet (not all that often), it's either a torrential downpour, which keeps me walking around the protected one-mile circuit in my neighborhood, or a stormy, driving rain that stings when it makes contact. That's just how it rains here.
But this Sunday morning when I walked, I found a new rain. It was wet, to be sure, but not too wet. Perfectly windless, a steady, constant, gentle stream of rain. A steady, constant, gentle stream of rain falling on the sleeping world.
That rain blessed me. And after an hour, I was wet through and through.
I saw God this morning, loving us like the rain. Gently, softly, quietly....a constant stream of grace soaking us while we sleep. It seems to me that whatever we face, we face it graced. We face it soaked. We are hemmed in, behind and before, and a hand is laid upon us. If we stop to think about it for too long, that knowledge might just be too wonderful for us. Want more? Click here to read Psalm 139.
