September 24, 2012

When You're Dry and Crunchy

Last year’s drought came and went. When it left, it took much of the water from ponds and lakes with it. It also seemed to suck out my spiritual life along with the water. Most of Texas was dried up with cracks in the ground that’d make the State “proud” for their size.

But today?

I sit and watch rain after rain come and fill up what was lost from last year.

Last summer, empty brown meadows stood vacant of livestock. The only "green" we saw on the dead grass came from locusts. We could barely drive our windowless golfcart without a swarm of insects pelting us.

Many a farm in our area had large piles of ground beside bigger and deeper ponds. Ones that were dug out because they were dried up.

That long, dry summer was epic for these parts. If I’d give it a name I’d call it: “The Year Locusts Got Fat and Had A Party.”

I guess it was fun for the locusts, but not much else.

In times like those, it seems the world really is ending. Right now. And that the sky is falling any minute.

But here we are, again, with rain.

Last year, I couldn’t see what God had already planned to happen. All I saw was hot and miserable. All I wanted was for it to end.

We have trees that didn’t make it. But many more that did. We have better ponds and tall meadows that now need attention for hay.

It’s hard to complain. Yet I still want to.

Every day is a struggle to appreciate today. Who wants to see the muddy mess of what lies just outside a rainy door and say “Wow. Isn’t that just beautiful?”

But droughts do that to you. As much as we hate to live in them, we are tutored by trials and tribulations.

We are a constant pond of Living water that dries up and needs filling.Some seasons we need a drought so He can dig out the bottom, make our borders larger, enhance our holding capacity.

We want an immediate deliverance but then the ponds would be shallower along with the tree roots.

Some days we are dry and crunchy and the rain is too long in coming. Some days we just do not see beyond our needs for right now. But Jesus is still working. It doesn’t look like it. Or feel like it.

Or anything like it.

But if He's allowed to have free reign then we are not always moving. We also need to be idle and hollowed out. Groundwork requires digging and removing. But before long, your dry soil is replaced with Living Water.

It's a beautiful, muddy mess that we are when He saturates us with His Spirit. Droughts have purpose, though dreadfully barren. Yet, the rains do come. The ponds become full. The spillways pour out His goodness. The grasses drink their way up to being tall and green.

And just like that, His abundance is here.

Life lavishly lush with His bounty that our brown and crunchy spirits thrist for.

Before you know it, creation is testifying of His bounty.

The Gospel isn't just Jesus {He is only the beginning}, it is life itself, communioning behind the veil.