When the rain starts, I head for the door.
I love being out in the rain. When I was a child, my dad would stand in front of the screen door every time it stormed, enjoying the breeze and the scent, and I followed suit. In later years, I found I enjoyed rain-walks—anticipated and otherwise. Caught unawares by a squall when I was out, I would stumble home soaked and beaming, the tangled hair and drenched clothes a small price to pay for joy.
This is one of many reasons I’m convinced Ireland is my country. Rain saturates the climate even when it’s not raining. It wasn’t until I visited that I discovered the joy of what I heard locals call a “soft day”: mist-suffused and damp, the sort of day with no visible rain but that leaves you soaked through, nonetheless.
I have often wondered why I like being out in the rain so much.
But today I remembered, in the middle of wrestling with an umbrella. The first half of the walk had been sedate, a straight steady rain pounding down, but the wind caught me in the back half. It tugged at my umbrella, rendered the hood of my raincoat useless, directed at me instead of the ground.
I was delighted—and soaked. Smiling to myself, I gave up wrestling the umbrella and surrendered to a drenching. The rain increased in tempo the minute I closed the umbrella and I started laughing. I love the rain because it is so much out of my control. I love the rain because it reminds me of God.
I can’t direct it, control it, or often even predict it. I can prepare for it, but the rain will proceed as it will in spite of my preparations and often upends them. I know that it is powerful, and I’m wise enough to stay inside for thunder and lightning. I am aware of the power of a storm at the wrong time in the wrong place.
But when I am out in the rain, at the times I go, the combination of a storm’s strength and my own safety proves irresistible. I’m not going to be hurt. I’m in no danger of anything other than getting very wet. So it becomes a small, miraculous thing to exist in the presence of such power without being afraid. To understand the rain as something fierce and uncontrollable but also playful and delight and restorative.
I think we are all probably wrong about God.
I don’t mean about the things that we know about God that God has revealed to us through Scripture. I mean the things we assume, or guess, or imagine to be true about God. We all do this—because of our own experiences, because of our understanding, because of our backgrounds and contexts, because of the limitations of our humanity.
We tend to fill in the gaps. We tend to project. We tend to hypothesize.
When I was in high school, in the early days of the internet, I spent some time talking to a boy online: the son of one of my dad’s friends. I spent hours chatting to him in the evening, and I found myself fascinated by everything he said. He complimented me; he said funny things; because he went to a high school that I didn’t everything he talked about seemed new and impressive.
“You’re setting yourself up for disappointment,” Mom warned.
I decided he had dark brown puppy-dog eyes. Chestnut hair. He was a musician so presumably he was incredibly handsome and artistic. (This was in the days before phone cameras, friends.) When we made plans to meet, I was giddy. Without telling anyone, I started planning our wedding.
And then we met. We went to the mall, shared Chik-Fil-A, and walked around a lot.
My mom picked me up at the end of the evening. She arched an eyebrow. I got into the car, buckled my seatbelt, sighed and stared straight ahead. “I set myself up for disappointment,” I told her.
Of course, we’re never setting ourselves up for disappointment with God. He will always be more, better, beyond all our expectations. But we do have expectations and assumptions, ideas about God that we build from what we know of him. We like to think we know what God will do, how God will act in more specific ways than He will be good or He will be just. We connect the dots and paint a picture we think looks right onto what we can’t yet know.
You might say to me that we know how God will act because of Jesus. But Jesus confounded the expectations of everyone around him. Whatever his hometown expected Him to be, He wasn’t that. Whatever His family expected Him to be, He wasn’t that. Whatever His disciples expected him to be, He wasn’t that. Whatever sinners and religious leaders expected Him to be, He wasn’t that. He was everything good and lovely. He is redemption.
But He was also not, in any regard, what anyone had ever imagined God to be.
And why should I imagine that has changed? God showed us more than enough of Who he is, of course. God has given us everything. But God is God, and more than everything. How can such small creatures as we are come to know God wholly? We do come to know God in many ways: through the revelation He gives us of Himself through the Spirit, through His son, through Scripture. But we have not yet seen fully and we do not yet know fully even though we are seen and known.
God, I am sure, is waiting with delight to confound some of our expectations.
I wonder with great joy about what I will have wrong or will have simply underestimated. I think God as the source of all humor and joy will reveal to me more of play and laughter than I can ever have associated with Him. I suspect the extent of his mercy will nearly offend me. I suspect the depth of his righteous anger will astonish me. I suspect the Creator’s creativity will astound me more than it already does.
There is so much to know. So much I can’t know. And so much is out of my control. When I’m out in the rain, the storm serves as a reminder that this can be true and can be a cause for great delight. More importantly, it is a reminder to leave myself open to possibility. God is above all things—and I can’t wait for Him to continue to reveal Himself more and more in ways that challenge my assumptions.
Samaritan's Song 