Merry Christmas!

I hope you are enjoying a 

merry and bright day!

Merry Christmas!

If you'd like another hint:

Look in the tags of this post!

Shhhh! It's a Secret...

I hate doing this, but well you're going to have to wait two weeks before I let the cat out of the bag. 

If you want a hint: 

Let's just say it's going to give me a lot of writing material...

Hope you enjoy the season and have a blessed Christmas!

I'll see you back here in 2015!

The Rain Came Down and the Flood {of Thoughts} Came Up

Currently, I live in the Bay area. In case you haven’t heard, we are having a “big” storm.  Ok, I will consent to the fact that it is a storm. And the reason it is so big is the fact that we don’t have the infrastructure to handle it. Physical infrastructure that is. If there’s one thing you need to understand about Californians, it is that they are rarely prepared for rain {or any weather}. Ever. And when it rains most of them freak out. And it looks like the zombie apocalypse is happening. Or as we’ve dubbed this one, the Rainpocolyse.

But right now, we desperately need rain. That seems somewhat ironic since it is coming out of the sky as I type. The reason we need it so badly, is because we are in the midst of a drought. {Insert family inside joke about “in the middle of a drought,” that I narrowly avoided just now} 

And I’ve been thinking about the ways that it so directly relates to some life lessons. The first being that the rain has caused most people to stay home, work at home and keep their children and pets indoors. And often when we do that we slow down, or add minutes and moments to our days. When you are stuck inside, you do life differently.

When it rains, I give myself permission to read a book, make soup, stir up some hot chocolate, be creative or dream. I let my self do all the things I should be doing normally – resting, having nourishing food, enjoying treats, using my passions and building my dreams.

Thank you God for rain that refreshes the ground and our souls.

The other thing that I was thinking about is how in this world {or possibly, just my world} we want things to be predictable and scheduled, processed and efficient. And well, that is just not how life works. And I was thinking about all of this as I thought about how much we need rain and the rain is so good for the earth and it causes things to grow…and so on and so forth. And yet. And yet, we don’t get rain once a week to make everything grow. God didn’t say on these days on the calendar it will rain. He didn’t make it so that droughts are scheduled or that storms are in some sort of pattern.

He didn’t do any of that, but He could.

So why did he make things erratic and allow us to tear up the landscape he so beautifully created, thus making his perfect system no longer work? 

I don’t know. 

I do know that he has had the perfect plan since the beginning of time. And I do know that we can read about the droughts of old and the days of plenty. In each of those stories we find a reflection of him and his character. We also see that there was a purpose to the droughts and the storms, the days of plenty and the days of few. It was all part of the plan.