On Rain
I’m from a desert, where we get less than forty inches a year, and in the winter it gets so dry that your hands crack and bleed. I’ve lived on this island for nearly four years now, where at times it feels like we get forty in a day and after a shower the air is so moist that you never quite get completely dry.
When I first got here I marveled at it and said things filtered through the lens of novelty, overwhelmed by how the rain here was so much softer than the rain back home, and how you could just feel how much more full of life it was.
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Though this quickly changed after I had my first experiences with tropical storms. The sun receded, there were strings of power outages, and consecutive weeks of daily rain. During the Kona storms, it flooded so badly that people could paddle board down the street. In the middle of the night, videos of my friends standing in the road with the water halfway up their knees and rising. Homes flooded, we set up mattresses in a higher house for those on the ground floor. They said that the Kona floods caused over a billion dollars in damages.
Long after most people had recovered and returned to normal (many still struggle to do so), things still felt different. At this point I also knew more about the health effects of mold and started to notice it everywhere, in every environment. A silent, inescapable poison. I noticed I felt a little angry every time it started to drizzle.
I began to see the rain as destructive. A nuisance and something near malevolent. God’s chosen weapon in the book of Genesis when everything was too far gone and He had to wipe it all from the board to start from scratch. The weapon was still used today, and I could see it in the furniture left out to dry on the lawns of every house on the street.
Yet, despite this internal rebellion against rain, I still remember the quiet mornings. Growing up, after rain, my dad would open the windows, and walk out the house inhaling deeply. He would listen to the pitter-pattering like sweet music. He said the smell was good for you. That his plants must be happy and the reservoirs must be filling. If it could cleanse the world outside, it could cleanse your internal world too.
I remember that this was the way that God chose to start fresh. A baptism of the earth. To think of the way we baptize ourselves, the way we start again. When it feels like things are too far gone to ever be repaired.
After damage, sin, wear and tear, being soaked, molded through, and kicked around, or all the desperate situations in which we had little choice, we often have a choice in what we do next. That it might still be possible to start again, with a single swollen, soaked, and feeble step.
