GroshLink

Urbana 2006 seems like it's just around the corner. A new piece of the Urbana Student Mission Convention site is a blog seeking to to look at God's world today through the lens of what we know about God from scripture.

A complex, but necessary task. May we learn to embrace our role in God's story, instead of trying to make our story the center of the universe. AND may we also have the humility to acknowledge that we cannot know the full mind of God and accept that reality as we discuss the difficult questions raised by a messy world at the hands of a confused crew of caretakers. Below is a part of the most recent post, I'd encourage you to engage the conversation . . .

Go right to the site. . . Jesus said in Matthew 5:45, "...your Father in heaven ...causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

Rain. The great equalizer. Jesus points out that it rains equally on the righteous and the wicked. Rain is a wonderful gift in healthy doses. Too much or too little of it can be disastrous.

Mumbay (Bombay) India got too much of it yesterday. 37 inches in one day too much. That's 3 standing feet of water, falling from the sky in one day. More rain than India has ever had in such a short time. Several hundred lives were lost due to the floods and mudslides that resulted.

It feels ironic to juxtapose these words of Jesus about rain (as a generally good thing) with yesterday's deadly downpour. I wonder if any Christians in Mumbay yesterday opened their Bibles to double-check the exact wording of God's promise to never send another flood like the one Noah saw. It probably felt similar to that day.

Rain. We have umbrellas and parkas to keep it off. We rain-proof our homes and vehicles. We create gutters and ditches and levees and channels to move it where we want it to go. We depend on it for our food and livelihood. We appreciate its cooling effect on a hot day. We appreciate the green it brings. In a fit of childlike spontaneity, we might run around in it, even as adults.

We like it in proper doses and in its proper places.