Praying for Rain

By: Elizabeth Horsley

As a child growing up in suburban California, rain was an inconvenience at best. Rain meant staying inside the crowded auditorium at recess and getting miserably wet on the walk home from school. Rain meant cancelled plans and low spirits. I understood in a theoretical way that food grew from plants and that plants required rain. We even had a little lemon tree that provided fresh lemonade every summer, but the bulk of our food still came from the grocery store. Farms were far away outside of town. What did they have to do with me? I always wanted to get out of the rain as quickly as possible. When our Lord says that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, I looked on that rain as a hardship.

A Wheat Field above St Andrews, Scotland

My perspective changed when I decided to stay at my university in Texas and take classes over the summer. That summer we had over 100 days in a row of over 100 degree F heat. No rain for weeks and weeks. I went to church with the sons and daughters of the local area farmers. Every Sunday we prayed for rain, sending our cries to heaven as the farmers watched their crops wither under the brutal sun.

As the summer drew to a close, the rain finally came. It was a soaking, healing rain. As we waited for a carpool, we just stood in it, praising the Lord, our bodies dripping with life-giving water. I finally had some inkling of what the Lord meant. The rain is a blessing and God lavishes his blessings even on those who do not deserve it. Who among us is just before God?

As little as two generations ago, we were far more connected with the land. Most of our grandparents tucked vegetable gardens into their yards. They knew the farmers who worked the fields. That is, if they were not already farmers themselves. The people in Jesus’s day even more so understood their dependence on the land. We see agrarian symbolism woven throughout the Bible. Our modern disconnection from something as basic as growing our own food means that our spiritual leaders must spend inordinate amounts of time explaining to us the behaviors of sheep in order to understand the analogy. We have coins that display mustard seeds so that we can understand just how small they are. But when Jesus said “consider the lilies of the field,” he didn’t need a powerpoint slide showing a field; he just pointed to a field. His audience understood.

Loss of context for the Scriptures is a great loss, but there is a greater loss. Disconnection from creation means a disconnection from our Creator. The Scriptures tell us “ever since the creation of the world, [God’s] invisible attributes of eternal power have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they [the wicked] have no excuse.” Romans 1:20. What happens when the wicked shut themselves off behind four walls? What happens when we cannot marvel at the stars drowned out by the city lights? Humans lose holy fear of the Lord. Chaos descends.

The Horsley Garden

What can we do to combat the chaos? Plant a garden. Our first parents were placed in a garden and given the charge to tend the land. The simple and primal act of growing a vegetable and eating it is an act of defiance against the powers of darkness. Invite children to join you in your gardening. Gardening with children has the obvious benefits of teaching them about science: the water cycle, parts of a plant, etc. However, wonder at the natural world, which is science at its best, should naturally lead to wonder at the Creator of this world. Some of my most profound moments of prayer have come while tending the garden.

This essay should publish around harvest time, when I will, God willing, be curing pumpkins and putting up cans of tomato sauce. As I write though, I am in the midst of a hot summer. My water barrels have run dry and I am praying for rain.