Dragons in the Sky
Tonight we’re experiencing another torrential rain with winds that sound like a hurricane. I should be feeling sympathy for my animals, but instead I’m fearing most for my potatoes. My poor soggy potatoes. How much more rain can the skies make? Where does it all suddenly come from?
I’m sure there’s a sturdy explanation out there on Wikipedia somewhere, but it’s hard to shake a sense of ill-favor, even though my theology doesn’t really permit it. Emma, our 12-year-old, just stumbled down from her upstairs bedroom, shook from being awakened by thunder, and asked pleadingly, “Why does it have to keep raining?” I wonder how many of us over the centuries have asked that question in various stages of desperation. We don’t really have anything to fear here but the loss of a few small crops and some extra work in the basement, but I begin to have a sense of the exposure and need felt by farming forbearers and their kin across the less-sheltered developing world.
I have every sympathy for the clever authors of ancient mythologies, ascribing complicated personalities and feuds to violent and threatening turns of weather, as our foundation walls sprout mini-leaks that bleed slowly like demonized ceilings in The Ring. The Chinese ancients implicated multiple dragon-gods in rain events, and Zeus, the Greek god of rain, was appropriately placed at the head of the other gods and depicted in images with a lightning bolt in his hand. Whoever is in charge of the rain is pretty much IT, I’ve come to understand.
And now it slows, and sleep returns, and worry over what the morning light brings is subjugated to some hours of peace. Thank you, Lord, for the moisture. And for safety through the storms.
