I Read The Weather As A Sign

It started as a small thing and it has grown, and I suspect you know roughly when it started.

You planned something with the family, and it rained, and you thought: maybe not today then.

Which is fine. Everybody has thought that. But somewhere in the last year it stopped being a shrug and became a reading. Now when the sky goes over, something in you says: that is God, and He is saying not this.

And that has consequences well beyond a walk. It means the weather has become a channel, and a channel that carries a message about the family walk carries messages about other things too, and there is now quite a lot riding on a low pressure system moving across the country.

I want to go at this carefully, and I want to be clear about which part I am arguing with, because I am not arguing with your desire to hear God. That part is right and I would not touch it.

A cloud like a man's hand

There is an account in Kings that gets used to support exactly this, and read properly it does the opposite.

And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand. And he said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not. (1 Kings 18:44, King James Version)

There ariseth a little cloud.

Now notice everything that had to happen before that cloud meant anything.

Elijah had been given a specific word about rain, before there was any weather at all. He prayed, seven times. He sent a servant to look, deliberately, for a thing he had already been told about. And only then, when a cloud appeared, did it carry a meaning, and the meaning was the one he had been given in advance.

You are looking at a sign that came after the word rather than instead of it, and it was never the weather that was doing the speaking. 1 Kings 18:44 has the word given first and the cloud confirming it afterward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that order clear without dismissing anybody's desire to hear.

And notice what the cloud was not. It was not the message. It was the visible edge of something already promised, and it was so small it took seven looks to find.

You have a God who speaks first and confirms second, and it was never a sky that had to be interpreted to know His mind. The written word gives the word before it gives the cloud, and the Spirit of God is what keeps a man who genuinely wants to hear from reading a forecast for it.

What a sign has to be to be a sign

So here is the test, and it is a plain one.

Weather is not addressed to anybody. It arrives for the whole county at once. When it rains on your Tuesday, it rains on nine hundred thousand other people's Tuesdays, and it is not carrying nine hundred thousand different instructions.

And there is a second test, which is the one that will actually settle this. Does it work in reverse? When the sun comes out, is that God saying yes, go? Or does the reading only ever produce one answer, which is stay in? The weather is not addressed to you, and hearing God has never once run on conditions that arrive for the whole county at once.

You are not receiving instructions through a low pressure system, and it was never guidance that has been keeping this family indoors. 1 Kings 18 puts the word ahead of the cloud and lets the cloud confirm it, which is exactly why the Spirit of God will not leave a man reading a sky for a message.

And I want to say the harder half of it gently. A reading that only ever produces one answer is not a reading. It is a preference that has found a respectable name, and the respectable name is what has made it impossible to argue with, including for you.

Let the sky mean nothing

So the practical part, and it is the plainest instruction in this article.

Go out for ten minutes in whatever the sky is doing, and let the sky mean nothing at all.

You are able to walk out under a cloud without it saying anything to you, and it has never once been unspiritual to treat weather as weather. The passage keeps the word and the cloud as two separate things in the right order, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man stepping out under a sky he is not reading.

Do it when it is raining. Do it when it is not. The point is to break the channel, and a channel is broken by putting nothing through it for a while.

And keep the listening. Keep it entirely. Take the family walk to God the way you take everything else, and let Him say what He says, in the way He has always actually said things to you, which if you think about it honestly has not been through a forecast.

You are able to stop reading the sky without stopping listening, and those two have never once been the same thing. 1 Kings 18:44 has a man who heard God first and looked at the sky second, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody putting the two back in the right order.