Trusting God in the Drought

Some of us got some rain this week.  Some of us did not.  Those who did not get any rain still need it.  Those who did get some rain still need more.  A lot of people have been hoping for rain.  A lot of people have been praying for rain.  Yet, we either have not gotten rain or have not gotten enough rain.

I’m sure some people are starting to wonder about this.  We know that God is good.  We know that God knows we need rain.  We’re told that God answers prayers.  We’re told that God knows how to give good gifts to God’s children.  So why is God not giving us the rain that God knows we need?

Well, I started thinking about that.  I’m not saying I have the answer, but this might be part of the answer.  See if it makes sense to you.

This is not, of course, the first hot and dry year we’ve had.  Some of you have seen lots of them.  Some of you are even old enough to remember the 1930s, often referred to as the “Dirty Thirties”, when for year after year there was heat and very little rain.  I’m sure people were praying for rain then, too.  And God was not giving them rain, either.  And I’m sure some people wondered why, just as we wonder why now.

But think about what those years did for the people who survived them.  It made them tougher.  It made them stronger.  It made them more determined.  And they needed to be, because what happened as soon as the 1930s ended?  World War II, of course.  A fight for the right of people and nations to be free.  The generation that survived the Dirty Thirties won that war for freedom.  They then came home, determined that the next generation would have things better than they had.  And so they came home and worked hard and brought prosperity to this country such as has seldom been seen.

There’s a reason that generation has been called The Greatest Generation.  And one of the things that formed that generation was surviving the 1930s, when it was hot and dry and people’s prayers for rain did not seem to be answered.  I can’t prove it, but I think it’s possible that God was using that time to form and shape a generation of people so they could meet the challenges of the coming years.

Is that what’s going on now, too?  I don’t know.  It’s certainly possible that this hot and dry year is just that, a hot and dry year, and that next year things will be cooler and wetter again.  It’s even possible that we’ll still get rain and things will work out all right.  But it’s undeniable that we do have challenges today.  The fight for freedom is never completely won.  And there are certainly plenty of economic challenges, too.  So, as always, there is much that remains to be seen.

The point, though, is that God will always have plans and purposes that we know nothing about.  God can see farther into the future than we can ever imagine.  When we think about “long-term planning”, we think, maybe, of five years or so.  Many of us think of a much shorter time than that.  But God can see five hundred years down the road.  God can see five thousand years down the road.  If the world is still going to be around five million years from now, God can see that, too.

So whether it rains or not, let’s trust God.  Let’s trust that God is great and God is good.  Let’s trust that God is doing what’s right even if, at the moment, it does not seem right to us.  And let’s remember that, even if it does not rain, God has not abandoned us.  Because God’s promise is much greater than a promise of a good crop.  God’s promise is of eternal life for all those who accept Jesus as their Savior.  It’s worth going through some things to get that.