The wet season has arrived. Someone reported more rain last week than in all of 2001. Someone else couldn’t remember rain like this without a cyclone. Another commented that you never ask for the rain to stop.
Yet I couldn’t help remembering P.J. Hartigan’s poem where Hanrahan believes "we’ll all be rooned before the year is out." Some have an aura of gloom, no matter what happens.
In the same set of circumstances, we respond in different ways. Some choose to ignore God when things go well - perhaps even say there isn’t any God - but then blame him for hard times. Others are thankful to God no matter what happens.
Paul and Silas had been flogged, thrown into the inner cell with their feet in stocks... About midnight they were "praying the singing hymns to God..." (Acts 26.25). Later Paul wrote, "Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thess. 5.16-18).
Rain at last! Now is the time to give thanks to God - and to include him in our thinking and planning and all of our lives.
© Peter J. Blackburn, Burdekin Newspapers, February 2002
