Lord, Bring the Rain...

LORD, BRING THE RAIN...
I would say that the past ten years of my life has been a tough season to bear through. It has been a stream of struggles from intensive college and graduate studies, to the dissolution of a marriage, to forsaking former life aspirations, to living with constant uncertainty in following a calling, and all the sticky stuff in between. I am not one to disclose all my misfortunes or troubles in order to incite pity. I neither need it nor want it. I am merely listing some of the more challenging experiences I have encountered in the past decade that collectively have made the years a bit more trying than I would have hoped.
 
It has become truer now more than ever: life yields the unexpected! That is for sure. But when the unexpected is overwhelming, or the unexpected falls drastically short of what one is disposed to accept, life then becomes a time of trying who you are. A time that tries your patience, a time that tries your faith, a time that tries your strength, a time that tries your temperament, a time that tries your tenacity, in essence, it becomes a time that tries every part of who you are. People encounter a crisis when the trials they face are too much for them to bear and they fail to cope with the need of understanding the meaning of their experiences or enduring their magnitude. In fact, every person encounters the preliminary stages of a crisis numerous times in their life, but how they manage to assimilate and understand their experiences will determine if further crisis symptoms are averted or not.
  
We never know if we are capable of handling the crisis experience or not until we come to the moment of truth when we face it and it becomes unavoidable. No one can say how they would respond to crisis experiences before experiencing them. In the extreme, who can say how they would respond to the death of their child, their divorce, being sexually victimized, intense psychological distortions, or any other severely traumatic life experience. However, many people go through life never experiencing these horrific events, but what is common to all people, though, are the experiences of emotions. We all experience emotions but to differing degrees. Emotions are very powerful and we have no direct control over them. They are involuntarily and unconsciously stimulated. What we do have control over is what we do when we experience them.
 
This past decade has been a time of experiencing a range of emotions that were very far outside my expectations, and some, outside my ability to understand and readily accept. Some I coped with better than others, and some disrupted the very core of my being. Needless to say, my recent  years in life have felt like a journey through a desert with an oasis here and there to keep me going but mostly the scorching sun and miles of sand. The desert is harsh place for sojourning but one that can prove useful in certain ways. Just like the way the quality of a metal is tested with fire, the wilderness can test the courage and substance of a person when they see nothing and yet keep going. When a person continues to push on despite a lack of evidence for their advancement, one could either call them persistent, unyielding, courageous, or just plain crazy.
  
What does it take for a person to keep going even though they have no criteria to mark their progress (or to know if they are progressing at all). I think the benefit of traveling through the wilderness is that the Lord can use that time to refine who you are. He can purge you, strengthen you, and sharpen you. He can take the undesirable experiences and make you see what you could never see otherwise. A tree does not blossom all year but bides its time in the winter waiting for the coming spring to bear its fruit. Like a tree, if we are in a time of winter, it is a time of preparation and is not suited to be a time of harvest. The Lord uses every season of our life to teach us and guide us if we are willing to listen.
  
It is hard to listen when you are bombarded by the trials of life. I would say it is like trying to talk on the phone while walking down a busy street with lots of construction work going on. You know what it is like when you walk by a jackhammer? Yeah, it's like that! Every trial that you are going through is like another jackhammer beside your ear....something that tries to demand your attention and is so loud that it is barely possible to tune it out. Maybe some trials are more noisy than others or seem close to you than others, but they all accumulate and compound in your mind no matter how big or small they are. Therefore, I will keep walking down the this road I am on and I will wait for the calm of the afternoon whenever it may come.  
The Lord will give peace when there seems to be none and the Lord will bring rain when the land is ready.
 
"Lord whatever your are trying to teach me, help me hear your voice in the midst of the struggles of this life. And, however you are molding me, shape me as you will and when it is time for spring and to bring forth the blossoms for the harvest, bring the rain you have prepared for me........bring all the rain, Lord.......until then, I wait patiently for you."