Let it rain, and let us dance

Remember when we could see  rain come tip-toeing across the pasture toward us, and we didn't run like an old fox in a field? We just stood there for the longest time, till that shower finally reached us.

Remember when we could see streaks, huge streaks of light and dark reaching from what the Bible calls the heavens down to what the Bible calls the earth and that always let us us know that rain was happening across the way?

Remember when it not only wasn't something that bothered us, this getting wet thing, but it was in fact actually pure fun? When the rains came and we liked it?

 In many ways, that was as close to pure worship as some of us will ever get, that moment when we danced in a summer rain. Threw down a few steps with God himself leading. Laughed, cackled, danced as our hair got wet and our day got dampened. It was worship, with no building, no plan, no book. Just us, and the rain of God that pointed us to the reign of God. It was a thank you from God to his over-burdened and self-absorbed and self-stressed creation. It was a a dance order for the serenity of wetness awarded to us by a God who dances equally, joyfully with us. He splashed in puddles of his own making. And we surrendered to him who made us but has been looking for us in a battered Garden ever since.

We let the rain pelt us, and it mattered not. Let it melt us, and it didn't disillusion us. We stood there, swinging to an unknown rhythm from an unseen music-maker and we let there be a spiritual deluge. No calender. No to-do list we were falling behind on. No bills. No diagnoses. No jeopardy. No worry. Just us and the dance master.

We let it teem down, beat down, shower down, roll down our body as we turned around and did something we never do anymore because we're so full of stuff we have to get done. We laughed out loud, and never once looked around to see if people were in on the joke or not. We let the emotional and mental cats and dogs come sheeting down from the skies upon us, your people, your children, your needy, your hopeful. We let it rain.

Today, I feel like dancing again. Today I see the two or more of us, standing stand out on a country road, green shrubbery and trees and lush bushes on either side of the road, shade blocking the sky. I see the rumpled clouds starting to open like that wonderful scene in Independence Day that was stolen right out of Close Encounters when the space ships settle down after ripping through our atmosphere turning clouds into giant pink cotton candy beings. I see the rain start, with drops as big as 50 cent pieces hitting the dusty back road ... plop, plop, plop onto the dirt, causing a screen of dust to drift heavenly with each large drop plowing the road.

I see it like it is happening right now, but it was back when we were little kids with matted hair years away from the pressure of daily combs and brushes as a matter of routine,. We wait for the rain like Christmas Eve, wait for it and wait some more till the rain picks up pace and production and soon we just allow an hour of our busy lives to pass swiftly by as we just stand on that dirty gravel road of time, and we let the soaking rain come.

And we just don't care. It just doesn't matter that we're starting to get wet. Then we get wet. Then we get soaked. And you know what we do? Not a darn reasonble, adult-like thing. Nada. Nothing.

You really want to know what we do?

We dance. Together, or even alone. We dance in the summer rain, and the world not only accepts it, it rejoices in it. We dance away our cares, and what's for lunch or dinner and what's the next thing on our PDAs we have to accomplish.

Like Prince on a Super Bowl night, we sing...  never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted to one time see you laughing
I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain.

:Like Ian Hunter we dance in the summer rain and sing ... Billy said this town is dying,
It’s dying just to be like me.
He was fighting everything in sight,
Died when he was 23.
I used to meet him down at his cafe,
He had one eye on the door
And the other on the writing on the wall.
He’d get restless and angry and we’d all laugh
’cause we weren’t really scared,
We was his friends, he wouldn’t hurt us at all
And all he’d say was rain, rain, rain.:

Like the Temptations, we danced and we tell the world we it would rain; Like Milli Vanilli, we lip-sync the words about blaming it all on the rain. The rain increases and we joyfully listen to the "Rhythm of the Rain.

Oh, we will sing. We will dance. We will carry on, as my Mama used to say. Heck we might even take time to discuss the book that Garth Stein wrote about the Art of Racing in the Rain that has little to do with art or racing or rain but has everything to do with living and dying and sharing along the way.

Still, through it all, we ask that it keeps raining. Because somewhere along the line we grew up and supposedly grew wiser, and somewhere along the line we started taking colorful umbrellas in case it started to rain, and we put on rain coats just in case, and we started putting rubber boots into the trunks of our cars just in case. And somewhere it all just got boringly dry, and we squeezed all the life out of living, If it started to rain, we went inside. If the cool, sweet-smelling breeze coming off a summer rain happened to embrace us, we shut the windows.

Oh, Loving, Magical, Miraculous Father, eliminate the bitter clutter from our lives today, and let it rain again. Come to us a in a tsunami of love, racing into our leathery-dry lives. Oh, let it rain, my Father, my Papa, my Abba, My Jehovah, My Adonai.

Let rain return to gushing down like when we were so desperately young; let the type of rain that so seldom comes anymore because we looked up and we were painfully old come again in bucket fulls.

Father, treat today as if it were a glorious mystery solved only by the greatest of detectives, and let life be elementary again.

Let the rain of eternity's prom begin again, letting us slow dance as if we had all the time in the world because we do in God. Let us love each other with the sweetness of first love, all anticipating and shyness and coyness and exploration as the rain begins for us again in the corners of mediocrity. Let God's Spirit spark the morning sun's rays, with clouds of steam rising all around us. Let the Spirit of God draw the moon's fullness and cool beauty to us like magnet to iron, and again let your rain flush us from disturbed sleep.

While men and women squabble about what they deem to be important moral matters, help us remember that you God just shake your head and you DANCE. Let's join the Lord of the Dance in what really matters. John Fogerty wrote two rain songs, one of which reminded us that it's possible to see the rain falling down on a sunny day.

So, let the rain of the Lord come down this Monday, let it drizzle this Tuesday, let it pour this Wednesday, burst from seeded clouds of mighty joy on Thursday. Let this week of magnificence flow like water from the streams of mountains He carved. Let the shouts of triumph come racing through the valleys between those same cold rocky mountain tops of Israel. Let the writer of mountainous love stories pen again epic tales of nation's created, families founded and generations begun all based on where the rivers flow.

Let 10,000 prayers of beauty sing out; let 10,000 songs of grace meet and diminish 10,000 songs of pain; let 10,000 blessings rain down on God's people today.

My Love and Adored one, let your Spirit envelope us, cover us, immerse us in re-invigorating God-water. Like water for a thirsty pet, let us dive down, down, down into the darkness and coldness of the deep pool, and come back up refreshed, ready to dance again.
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As the music flares, soften us like newly stirred dirt, pat, pat, patted with rain water. Let us stand in needy wonder, in rows of plowed earth anticipating the slow, life-sharing, life redeeming rain. Let us dance as the moving soybeans.
As the ground shifts, and the the freshness crumbles, as the earthworm crawls somehow through the very ground that had seemed so impossibly hard just hours earlier, as the clouds turn in handfuls of gray and somehow the wind lifts and places down by the hand of intelligence not accident, and the flow of God's tears race down the grandest of faces in the soon to be grandest of skies, let it rain. Let us dance as wheat and cotton and corn.

Let it all begin with my one prayer for rain. Let it rain, and let us dance.