Yes, It Is A Rainy Dawn
NOTE: I started writing this back in August. Since that day, we have had almost no rain until yesterday. Now that we were blessed with yesterday’s rain, I decided to finish. The rain probably has nothing to do with it, but the finished product comes from a decidedly more positive point-of-view than if I had finished it in August. This is hardly worth the mention, just an observation of “the condition my condition was in” just 60 days ago. Thank you God for the rain, and thank you for your continued blessings!
The morning’s alarm sounded all too early. The alarm to which I refer is the fourth, after dismissing the previous three. I threw back light bed covers, and made those all too familiar sounds as I forced myself simultaneously upward and forward, then with a pivoting motion, I slung my legs towards the edge of the bed. The sound, I imagine, is akin to that of an aged, overweight, grizzly bear as he emerges from winter’s hibernation. That is, as in my case, the grizzly had spent half of a lifetime smoking, drinking, or otherwise overindulging and was also cursed from birth with bad sinuses.
My feet found old, battered, and paint-spattered Crocs which serve as “house shoes” at that time of the morning. I trudged across the darkness of the room and as I reached for the doorknob, I heard a low rumble of thunder. My somewhat normal routine is to turn right, towards the kitchen to start the coffee pot before moving on to the next steps, all with the goal of arriving at work on time. This morning though, I turned to the left, driven by the bladder of a 58-year-old man whose 58-year-old prostate had granted the gift of a full night of sleep without a trip to the bathroom. Standing there, attending to the aforementioned business, I heard thunder again, louder than before, closer, with a longer pronounced rumble. “It’s getting closer,” I thought, and my mind produced the voice of Bob Seger, “I woke last night to the sound of thunder,” the lyrics of a song and the story of a young couple in the back seat of a car and “movements” of the night. I returned to my bed for a few minutes and lay in the darkness, listening as the storm grew closer and closer, then to the rain outside as it pelted the bedroom window.
I’d say that for most, the overwhelming urge would be to pull back the covers and blow off the day completely; to draw oneself into a fetal position amongst the covers and spend the day dozing on and off, drifting in and out, from one dream to the next. Not a bad idea, I admit, but for me, well, it is just something I do not do. No, correction. It is not simply something that I do not do, it is something that I CAN NOT do. I don’t know, hell, almost as if it is part of my genetic code, my DNA.
On mornings exactly like this one over the years, I learned to appreciate God’s bounty of rain as I grew up on a farm helping my father fulfill his dream. From the age of 10 or 11, my twin brother and I were our father’s farmhands. We were given responsibilities that we could handle and as we grew in strength and age, so did the farm tasks we were expected to manage. Many days, my dad woke us up early by opening the bedroom door and switching the light on and off, saying, “Off and on, off and on, off your ass and on your feet,” or something similar. The last thing a teenage boy would want to hear. We’d always have a good breakfast and then we would go out and face a full day of farming. The work was not all bad, in fact, there were many good days and rewarding days, and days when the spirit of the Lord descended down, revealing himself to me and to me alone, teaching me of his protection, of his love, and mostly, of HIS Grace. Then there were the days when nothing would go correctly. One thing though, the work was CONSTANT! It is why I came to favor the rainy mornings many years ago because we’d get to sleep a while longer. Dad’s wake-up on these days would be, “Get up boys, we gotta do something, even if it’s wrong.”
I need to take a short detour for a minute though to clarify a few things about my father. First and foremost, he wasn’t a tyrant, as the above description might imply. He did work us hard and steadily, but I don’t remember missing any ballgames or important extracurricular activities, and on occasion, he would shut everything down for a couple of hours and we would go to the creek for a swim. There, he would jump, dive, flip, and play “gator” with the best of them. Afterward, we would return to the soybean fields and work sometimes into the night. The thing about my dad was that farming was his second occupation. He taught school and was a basketball coach for a living, but farming was his passion. I think he had hopes that my brother and I might make it our passion as well, but we chose other directions.
Then one rainy morning, I awoke without my Dad’s urging voice. Disoriented a bit, I rubbed my eyes and ran my fingers through a much thinner head of hair. The morning seemed the same as those mornings from years ago with the exceptions being, I was grown and my Dad was no longer with me. I was on my own, had my own family, and carried the responsibilities of fatherhood, being a husband, and keeping the wolves away from my door. I struggled with the weight of family, paying the bills, and establishing a career. I was around 25 or 26 years old then and on that particular rainy morning, I forced myself to lie still and fought the urge to jump at the alarm. I found the experience to be more difficult than I imagined it would be. I found as I got older, that the imprint placed on me regarding work ethic and rising early stuck, making it nearly impossible to sleep past 7:30 AM. The code that runs through my being I guess has run in my bloodline for generations. I wonder sometimes if I lived at a different time or era before being born to this lot, and if so, did this trait exist in the person I was before reincarnation? Perhaps so, perhaps not.
How does any of this relate to a morning thunderstorm in the year 2022? Well, maybe there is no natural “Segway” from one place to the other. Maybe it is nothing more than the rambling thoughts of an old man. To this old man, at least, the pre-dawn rumble of an approaching thunderstorm conjures feelings and thoughts of times long ago, of youth, of simpler times, and yes, even thoughts of a more private nature regarding rainy mornings.
Rainy mornings represented to me, not a day without work, but often a delayed start of work. To the one who arose early every day, a start-of-day reprieve often provided an opportunity to capitalize on time usually spent on preparation for a work day. Coming up, rainy mornings gave me extra time. Time to meditate, time for Bible study, or most importantly, time to consider future days, and future dreams, and attempts to visualize what my world would be like in 3 years, 5 years, ten years, and beyond.
These days, I still awake fairly early, but I’m not so pressured to rush. After 33 years at basically the same job, I admit that I’m often less motivated than I was as a young man. I’m less driven now, in part because while the wolves still exist, they just aren’t right at my door. Even so, I know that each new day can bring a complete reversal of fortune, a lesson I’ve learned time and again. I’ve never been afforded the opportunity of complacency.
So regardless of what time I arise, I remind myself to be thankful and to face each day as it comes, regardless of rain or drought, heat or cold, storms or calm. Each day is a gift and an opportunity to enjoy the blessings of God. Rain or shine, a new day is a chance to right the wrongs of yesterday, to pay attention, and try again to get it right.