I Do Not Know What Rain Would Look Like

He has been praying for rain for four years. That is what he calls it, anyway, and everybody in his family knows what he means.

Not weather. The other kind. The dryness that got into the house somewhere around the year his father died and never really left, and which he cannot point to on a map and cannot explain to a doctor.

And a fortnight ago his nephew asked him a question over a fence, casually, the way young men ask things they do not know are heavy: what would it actually look like, if it came.

He said he would know it when he saw it. Which was a lie, and he knew it was a lie while it was in the air.

Because he does not know. He has no picture. He has been asking for four years for a thing he cannot describe, and now he has begun to suspect that a man who cannot picture what he is asking for is really just complaining out loud in the direction of the sky.

If you have been asking for something you could not draw, come and lean on this gate a minute. Nobody is going to hand you a definition and call it an answer.

Not being able to picture it is not a fault

Let us settle this at the gate, because a man braced for a diagnosis cannot hear anything else.

The idea that you have to be able to describe an answer before you can ask for it is not from Scripture, and it is a heavy thing to lay on a man in a dry season. The people in the Bible who ask best are frequently the ones who ask worst: they say help, or have mercy, or how long, and the record does not show anybody pressing them for specifics.

You are not disqualified by not knowing what you are asking for. Nothing about the vagueness of a request has ever made God harder to reach. I am not saying that to be gentle with you. The written word says likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), which puts your exact condition inside the ordinary Christian life instead of outside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what a man cannot picture.

What came down on a mountain, and what came first

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a way of getting a clearer picture.

There was a drought that lasted three and a half years, and a prophet went up a mountain and put his face between his knees, and sent a servant to look at the sea seven times before anything appeared at all.

And Elijah said unto Ahab, Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is a sound of abundance of rain.1 Kings 18:41

Read what he says before anything is visible. There is a sound of abundance of rain. The sky is still clear. His own servant has just come back from the sixth look with nothing.

And when it came, it did not come as a description. It came as a small cloud like a man's hand, which is the last shape anybody would have drawn if you had asked them to picture the end of a drought.

You have a God who does not require a sketch before He answers, and what He sends has never once matched the picture anybody drew. That is written down in the account exactly that way, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it land in a man who has been leaning on a gate feeling foolish about his own asking.

What actually comes down

Now, something must be said about what heaven sends, because a quiet assumption has grown up that it is a condition rather than a Person.

Go through it. Rain on dry ground. Bread on a desert floor. A word to a man who had none left. Fire on a mountain in front of a nation that had gone quiet. And then a sky opening over a river, and the Spirit; and a sky opening over a stable, and the Son.

The traffic runs one way, and it ends in a Person every time.

You are not waiting for a mood to lift. What comes down over a life is God Himself, and He arrives in person rather than as a change in the weather. Scripture says the Lord himself shall descend (1 Thessalonians 4:16), and himself is doing the work in that sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it true at your actual gate this evening rather than in general.

And if these four years have taken more out of a man than he has told anybody, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.