We followed the hearse the day we took my mother-in-law to the cemetery. I had thought it: the ebony black of that hearse, it intensified the colors of the world. I could see the sky reflected in the hearse’s polished steel.
The maples stood at attention, lining both sides of the road. Daisies, white and quiet, punctuated the ditches. This, her last trip through this world. I had thought this too: Was it just me, or had the world turned, more full-bodied, sweet?
A photographer had once told me, “You’ll find you will capture some of your best photographs on a grey, wet day. Want glowing, deep colors? Wait for rain.”
Do our tears saturate, intensify the colors of our lives?
Do we begin to see all as gift, when we stare face to face with losses?
Do we only begin to see when the eyes of our hearts are washed clean with tears?
I read this once too:
“The more I study gratitude, the more I have come to believe that an authentic, deeply held sense of gratefulness toward life may require some degree of contrast or deprivation.
One truly appreciates a mild spring after a harsh winter, a gourmet meal following a fast….Some blessings are not known until they are lost.
[In the study of individuals with neuromuscular diseases, researchers]
“were also struck by the redemptive twist that occurred in nearly one-half of these narratives:
out of something bad (suffering, adversity, affliction) comes something good (new life, new opportunities) for which the person feels profoundly grateful.”
Want glowing colors? Wait for rain.
But how do tears wash away our scales and not galvanize the world in layers of icy glaze?
What makes tears harden a life into resentment and bitterness?
How does rain saturate and enrich the colors of life and not simply make the world a soggy, muddy mess?
What factors determine whether suffering gives way to sight?
It’s October and I find myself looking out the window, watching sky’s sorrow tears down the panes.
Are all my questions answered with Job’s ancient question, “Does the rain have a father?” (Job 38:28).
Does my pain, my grief, my soul rain have a father?
“Do the skies themselves send down showers? No, it is you, O Lord our God…” (Jer. 14:22).
It is God who sends rain, God who allows pain.
This pain. This pain that we can’t hide from, escape, exile, exterminate. This pain that the drenches us and sticks to us, cold and wet.
Does God father this ache so I can see life’s deeper shades of magenta, violet, indigo?
“[H]e rained down manna for the people to eat… He rained meat down on them” (Ps. 78:27).
Rain down our food, God. Want life to deepen, enrich, nourish?
Wait for rain.
“[T]he Lord our God… gives autumn and spring rains in season, [and] assures us of the regular weeks of harvest” (Jer. 5:24).
Might the rain that falls in its season bring about a harvest of seeing?
The Wounded Healer comes to weeps with us. He comes to us like rain.
Let a storm, a loss, a rain of tears, bathe wash away the monochrome of the world.
I hadn’t waited for rain the day my mother-in-law’s coffin passed through the countryside the last time. But the tears had brimmed and bathed me with sight, with breath, wind, sun, sky.
Loss brilliantly backlights blessings. Fragility heightens beauty and rain deepens the shades of moments lived.
It’s another October morning and I see to the west the dark of clouds rising up over the woods, the trees all torched in autumn.
Soon, more rain.
The woods will light.
“She found, too, that now as she was accepting [Sorrow and Suffering’s] companionship in this way, she seemed more alive than ever before to beauty….”
~ Hind’s Feet on High Places 
(Edited repost from the archives)
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