"Sonshine...................."

For the last few days in this neck of the woods, all we’ve known is rain, that mixture of huge dark and white clouds seemingly stuffed into a space not big enough to contain them becoming a solid grey blanket that leaks almost incessantly. At times it’s no more than a drizzle; but here and there it turns into a downpour, a deluge that, yesterday evening, transformed the nearby, usually docile creek into a raging current. It makes a turn several hundred feet up the road, passing under a bridge, the onrush at such times more than a tiny wall can defend and a small church positioned there is always the first to suffer the consequences. I walked over there earlier this morning in the “drippy-drip” to investigate the situation, pleased to discover the waters had dropped at least four feet, the level previously about to flood the parking lot and fill their Sunday school rooms. A lone heron took to flight as I turned to reverse my route and return home. Hopefully the wetness yet predicted will not be of sufficient volume to threaten us again so soon… Hope: that word has been utilized a lot lately by those who occupy our sanctuary pulpit. It’s almost as if the definition of “faith”, as preached to us for the last four decades, has finally been realized to be erroneous in its demands. Nobody is abandoning the premises of such commodity being both a trust cultivated within us and a boldness that comes to us in a merger with the Holy Ghost; but I am hearing less of that “name it and claim it” theology wherein arrogance equates to divine authority transferred so as to operate out of our own “stinkin thinkin”. It could be just me. It does sound, though, like the idea of one believing, daring to trust God for the future and being faith-“ful” no matter what tomorrow brings, assurance found in an anchor-line connection that reaches “through the veil”, is starting to be the theme. Can it be we’ve weathered the fog at last?.....