Pray for Rain

It has been raining for 5 days straight now, the ground is saturated, the youth football teams uniforms, cleats, socks, helmets carry the field with them in muddy form. There is something about rain that cleanses, renews, and washes our souls it seems. I often have walked in the middle of a rain storm and talked with God, or talked out loud to myself because it was just me and the rain, and the rain wouldn’t talk back to me, would simply agree and continue to fall. I think it is vital to the human soul to withstand the elements, live through them, walk in them, experience them, survive them. There seems to be strength and growth in experience individually when you walk through the elements of weather and you meet them head on where they are. For this reason I have never carried an umbrella or taken dry shelter from one. I want to be out in it, live in it, experience it, feel it, I want it to build the armor of my soul thicker so that I will be up for withstanding future storms.

Being from North Dakota offers a distinct advantage as a human being to me. In that state you experience the extremes of heat, cold, rain, wind…after living there, you can live and thrive anywhere. People think of the north as the coldest place in the United States. They believe that we wear gloves and jackets year around, but they have never experienced the 100 degree week, with 98% humidity, or they are not aware that North Dakota pre ice age was once a rainforest. All they here about are the -30 degree winter days with 50 below wind chills and snow piled as high as your roof. That is apart of the experience as well but just a small part. The fact is when you live there, you drive right through the elements, you work in them, play in them, embrace them. In short you survive them, and feel stronger in the human condition because of it. There is a sense of accomplishment after deer hunting in 30 below zero and sitting around a campfire and talking about the day. What isn’t said but is felt is that, “ We are strong, we are resilient, we can withstand anything.” I miss those days, that cold, that heat, that wind that makes the wheat fields dance across the praire. There I am strong, there I am uplifted, there I am free to run into the eye of storms and come out on the other side unscathed and better for it.