Essay: God in Nature and Sunday Morning Rain

First posted in September, 2003

God, I love Sunday mornings, with too much coffee and too much lounging about.

Never mind that by my family's standards I'm a heathen for never going to church on these mornings, an aspect of being me with which I am now very comfortable. Churches seem to be heavily though not exclusively populated with people who are very good Christians on Sunday but no other days of the week; people who feel the need to impose their beliefs on anyone and everyone regardless of their age, current faith, or desire to listen. Donated funds from the congregation tend to go toward larger chapels to honor Him, when children in the same community go to school without proper coats in the winter. Perhaps I've just always gone to the wrong places for worship, but I find that I see God more and more in the immediate world around me: in the beauty of a sunset, in the power of a storm. I can be close to Him, talk to Him, without the middleman or the support group.

This Sunday morning in particular is glorious, because the rainy season (I think) is finally here, though its arrival is perhaps a month late in coming. I've missed it so much, waited anxiously for it, praying that each storm will not pass until it's laid upon us for days and days on end. An eerie glow grips the sky, a golden tinge of light falls on the just-yellowing alders in my yard, and their leaves begin to sway slowly in a building breeze. A mist consumes the mountains to the north, a darkness falls over the ocean to the south, and the shower begins. Gentle and steady at first, then suddenly hard and almost unforgiving. The sound of it on the roof at times is so intense that I can almost feel it inside my body, and I just close my eyes and dwell in that sensation.

There's at least a month of this to come... hopefully more considering how late it was in coming.



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