Manson's Memo 2/22

Rain, rain go away, come again some other day.

So far we’ve doubled our normal annual rainfall. There is a swamp today in the church’s front yard. The court yard is a lake. Not only are we getting a lot of rain, we’re getting it hard.

Now that the local TV stations have Doppler radar, it’s kind of fun to look and see just how hard it’s raining on us. Sometimes I go online to one of their websites and click on the current Doppler link to see what colors are showing. Blue and green are fairly light. Yellow is when it starts getting interesting. And when it gets to red, you know it’s bad.

I don’t know how we managed without that technology. It used to be we’d judge the rain by listening to it hitting the roof or looking out the window and seeing how hard it was falling. Now we can scientifically verify that it’s raining hard. Isn’t that better?

I wonder what it is about us that makes us want to have something that tells us what we already know. Does the radar make it any more true that the rain is falling than our own eyes? We can tell the difference between light mist and raining cats and dogs. Yet, there is that need to have something to tell us what we know.

Think of all the ways that God had told the world of God’s love for us. God spoke through prophets and poets and sages to tell us over and over that God loved the world. And yet, we always wanted something more. And so God sent Jesus to show us what we should have already known.

In Lent, we continue to look to the cross of Christ as the verification of God’s love. We look and we know the extent of God’s love for us. Sometimes it’s good to see something that we already know about.