Day 4 - it never rains

It has rained here solidly for two days.  The river which runs through our village, and which is normally about a foot deep and a lazy meandering stream, is a raging torrent which has broken its banks and is engulfing farmland and the park.  People in the houses near the river will be starting to fret as levels rise and the rain keeps on coming.  I havent seen it rain like this for years.

There's a saying ' it never rains but it pours'  ( probably a British proverb given our obsession with the weather!) and I guess this sums up my life since the start of the year.  So far we have had a major leak resulting in a ceiling coming down,  my mother had a car crash and wrote off her car, my mother-in-law died suddenly, my dad was diagnosed with cancer and a roof blew off one of the sheds at the family farm.    All in eight weeks !!   Into every life a little rain must fall - but sometimes it just pours and pours and pours until you feel you are drowning.

Life happens.  To all of us.  The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous and being a Christian doesnt in any way shield or shelter us from the storms.  And sometimes in the storms Jesus is asleep in the boat and we feel lost and doomed.   But what I have found ( especially in our recent tempestuous season ) is that the massive benefit Christians have over non Christians is the power of the family of God.   We have known people praying for us over the past two months - holding us before the Lord, interceding for us and loving us in heavenly places.   People who know us well and some who barely know us at all have stood round and over us like an umbrella.  Prayer is an awesome tool and is super effective.  But love is even better.  Combined - well ....... Im pretty sure there is nothing more powerful to bring down strongholds and silence the enemy.

Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days.  The devil poured down on Him as He contended with hunger and wild animals and heat and cold and exhaustion and isolation and temptation.  Relentlessly the attacks just kept on coming.  But Jesus knew how much He was loved - and He knew that His mission was to establish a family for His Father, to gather in brothers and sisters who would build each other up into a temple of praise and show the world what God was like by their love for each other.

So, if you are standing in the rain at the moment waiting for the next disaster to happen or struggling to keep your head above water - I pray that you would know the support and love and help of the family of God, the prayers of the saints and the intervention of the Spirit.   Nothing lasts forever.  The sun will shine again.