It Is Raining Again And That Is That

Nobody in your house decided anything today.

That is what I want to start with, because it sounds like an accusation and it is actually a relief. There was no discussion. Nobody weighed it up. Somebody looked out of a window at about four o'clock, and the whole week rearranged itself, and not one person in that room experienced it as a choice.

It has been like that for a while now. Long enough that the last two weeks have gone by without any of you being outside for anything that was not necessary.

And the strange part, if you sit with it, is that none of you actually mind rain very much. Nobody in your family has ever come home wet and been upset about it.

What has happened is that a reflex has replaced a decision, and reflexes do not get reviewed, because nobody notices them happening.

So this article is not going to tell you to be tougher. It is going to try to give you back about four seconds in which an actual decision can occur.

He that observeth the wind

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that describes exactly this and is about four thousand years old.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. (Ecclesiastes 11:4, King James Version)

He that observeth the wind shall not sow.

Read what it does not say. It does not say the wind is imaginary. It does not say the clouds are nothing. The weather in that verse is entirely real, and so is the wind, and the man watching it is not being called stupid.

What it says is much narrower and much more useful: watching it is the thing that stops the sowing. Not the weather. The watching.

You are not being told the rain is nothing, and it was never the weather that emptied your last two weeks. Ecclesiastes 11:4 puts the whole obstacle in the observing rather than in the conditions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a family standing at a window at four o'clock.

And notice how ordinary the alternative is. There is no heroism in that chapter. The instruction just before it is to sow in the morning and in the evening, which is to say: do the thing at the times available, without running the sky through a committee first.

You have been handed an unheroic answer, and it was never courage that this required from anybody in your household. The written word sets the sowing against the observing and asks nothing braver than that, and the Spirit of God is what keeps this from becoming a test of anybody's grit.

The reflex and the decision

Now let me separate two things that have been welded together in your house for about a year.

A decision has a moment in it. Somebody looks, considers, and concludes. It takes a few seconds and it can go either way, and sometimes it produces a no, and that no is fine.

A reflex has no moment. The window is looked at and the outcome is already there. Nothing was weighed, so nothing could have come out differently, and the family experience it as a fact about the day rather than as a thing anybody did.

That is why it feels like the weather is deciding. It is not. It is a reflex, and it has been running unchallenged, and nobody has once said out loud: shall we go anyway. Rain is not a cancellation, and getting wet and coming home and drying off is the entire risk being avoided.

You are not at the mercy of a forecast, and it was never the sky making these decisions in your kitchen. Ecclesiastes 11 puts the sowing back into the hands of the one watching, which is exactly why the Spirit of God works on four seconds at a window rather than on the weather.

Count the actual cost

So here is the practical part, and it is arithmetic rather than encouragement.

Say it out loud, once, in the room: what would actually happen if we went.

Somebody gets wet. Everybody comes home in ten minutes. Coats go over a chair. Somebody has a warm drink. That is the whole of it, and it takes about an hour to dry out, and none of it is remembered by anybody by Thursday.

Now count the cost of the other side. Two weeks indoors, an atmosphere in the house by Wednesday, and a family who have started to believe they do not go out.

You are able to count both sides instead of one, and it has never once been reckless to look at what staying in costs as well. The passage names the observing as the thing that stops the work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who slows a family down long enough for both columns to be visible.

And keep it to ten minutes. Not twenty. Ten, in the rain, out and back, because ten minutes is short enough that nobody has to be persuaded and long enough to break a reflex that has been running for a year.

You are able to break a habit with ten minutes, and it has never once required a whole afternoon to prove anything. Ecclesiastes 11:4 asks for sowing rather than for a good season, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a wet sidewalk with a family who went anyway.