speak soon

When it began to rain hard this afternoon, I was inside one of the bedrooms with the blinds shut to keep the bright heat out. A deep, long-grunting thunder was nature’s alarm.In just a few minutes, the afternoon shifted completely, from a tortured heat to clouds weeping. The sky was white outside, still bright, though dulled slightly by the weighted clouds. The drops were heavy, made to echo even more forcefully under the roof of our old house. Oh how we’ve needed the rain!

I was busy reading, but the rain was loud and called me to walk outside to a roofed but open part of the house. I sat down a few inches away from the rain, the concrete underneath me still pinching hot. I watched the rain and felt the temperature’s soft drop around me. I recalled the last time I remember walking deliberately into rainfall. It hasn’t happened very often in recent years.

I sat there for a while. Happy for the fresh air that arrived with the downpour. But it wasn’t enough to just sit there and watch.

I couldn’t help myself and decided to step out into the rain.

I found my dad by our front door, enjoying the cool of the rain, without having to be in it. He watched me walk into the raindrops. I was smiling. He was trying to convince me I was under acid rain.

I spread my arms out and just walked around our yard, considering how strong the drops of water beat down. I cupped my hands together, wondering how long it would take me to collect rain in the palms of my hand.

Later, I finished the book I began reading last night. I had made an informal pact with myself that to unwind this weekend, I would first turn to a book rather than my weekly episodes of The Voice. I hate that I’ve had very little time to read, or that I’ve made very little time to read. I haven’t read a book in months, and the last one was similar to watching a romantic comedy, but it took longer. (At the very least, I was entertained.)

On my way to a meeting yesterday afternoon, I conveniently ducked into a nearby second-hand bookstore right before arriving at a pedestrian walk. The cause of the detour was to avoid the awkward situation of arriving at a crosswalk when you feel like it’s about to go red for pedestrians but you can’t really tell – so you kind of make motions to move – but then you hesitate – then you realize you look stupid because you can still make the cross – but then you’re afraid you’ll embarrass yourself by being the person that walks across and is eventually honked at halfway there because the traffic light just went green — and you’re still in the middle of the road.

Yeah, I think about that stuff.

Even as I was in there for the lamest of reasons, I thought to myself, there must be a reason why I’m in here. Well another reason why I’m in here, not just escaping potential shame. So I looked at the first book that I found interesting, speed read the first few pages and a few random paragraphs from later chapters too. Less than five minutes after I walked in, I was crossing the road with new old book in hand (in perfect timing, I might add), determined I would spend a bit of the weekend getting lost in it. I was also determined to make that bookstore experience matter. It couldn’t have been just me cowardly running away from an awkward public situation that probably isn’t really that awkward to begin with.

I didn’t get lost in the book, I found myself in it.

Have you read Donald Miller’s, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”? I more than recommend it and I will most likely read it again, continuing to respond to it for weeks. And for months more, I’ll wish that I had written this book myself.

Here’s a quick excerpt, among many thought-provoking and action-enticing excerpts that I could have put forward:

“We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren’t capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake up slowly to everything. Your brain doesn’t stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the light on, and you’re groggy and pointing at things saying circle and blue and car and then sex and job and health care. The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn’t that big of a deal, that life isn’t staggering. What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We are all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given – it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral…

If I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and worte you and me, specifically, into the story and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.”

I guess it’s no wonder then that a few hours after I read those lines, I stepped out into the rain, and thanked God for such a beautiful day.

It wasn’t just another afternoon of rain.