Rainy Day Perspective

Rainy Day Perspective

2/22/13
9:00 am

Today is a rain day.  I totally needed a rain day today.  I have written before about how much the rain cleanses me.  I tried to take a picture of the rain from my view in the living room this morning.  My plans were to write about how these kinds of days make me want to write and how I wished I had a bay window to sit in, with comfy, colorful pillows all around.  But instead something else happened when I took that picture.

It has been a long time since I have felt that God has spoken to me.  Mostly because to be completely honest I have been angry and didn't try listening for Him much.  I was both afraid to hear what He might want to tell me about my attitude and actions and I was annoyed with Him.  I know the Bible says that all things work together for good for those who love Him, but I could see nothing good coming from me.  It can get pretty dark in this here brain of mine sometimes and well I was tired of it, because O M G when will it just end!?.  I am kinda ready to be "normal" now God, okay? 

So, back to the rain, and the picture.  Like I said, I took a picture of the rain as it was coming down really hard, but in the picture you can't see it.  You can see the effects of it: the wet ground, the puddles it created, the watery distorted reflections of the world around it.   In that moment when I looked at that photo God spoke to me, subtly without words.  It was just a flash of understanding. 

You see I realized that in so many of us, maybe even all of us, is that we are so much like that picture.  Others and sometimes even ourselves see us through the smeared glass filter.  It is easy to see the effects of the rain in our life: the mud, the puddles, the distorted water views; but the rain itself is hidden.  It just looks messy.  Instead of focussing on the cause of the mud in our lives, we just focus on the mud itself.  And we begin to see those distorted reflections as reality. 

My challenge and part of my healing is learning how to see the rain in myself and in others and not just focus on what it leaves behind. I need to stop looking at the watery distorted reflections, and look at what is really there, because the reality has so much more depth than the reflection.

*the smeary  child-sized fingerprints on the window, well I could say that it portrays how the fingerprints of others can affect our perspective or something equally deep, but the reality is that I just need to wash my windows.  Or maybe needing to wash the fingerprints of others of my windows is really the deeper analogy. You can be the judge.  ;)