Leaving It In God's Hands

You may have noticed that I write about the weather a lot.  Well, there are reasons.  For one thing, the weather changes a lot around here, so it always gives us something to talk about.  I don’t know how people open conversations when they live in San Diego or Honolulu or someplace where the weather is almost always the same.  For another thing, the weather is pretty important around here.  As an agricultural community, a lot of people’s livelihoods depend on the right amount of rain coming at the right time, the right amount of warmth coming at the right time, and a lot of other factors.  And as a rural community, we always have to be mindful of the weather when we travel, looking out for snowstorms in the winter and watching out for thunderstorms or even tornadoes in the summer.

The weather is pretty important to us, for a lot of reasons.  And yet, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.  The cliché is “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it”, and yet there’s no way that we can do anything about it.  I cannot make it rain, and I cannot make it stop raining.  I cannot bring about a snowstorm, and I cannot stop a snowstorm from coming.  I can pray about these things, and sometimes I do.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, but of course God does not always make the weather do what I want it to do.  If God did, it would always be about eighty degrees and sunny, with a very light breeze, and of course that rarely happens around here.

It’s probably a good thing that we cannot do anything about the weather, though.  After all, it’s rare that we all want the same things.  If human beings ever got the ability to control the weather, we’d probably have the biggest arguments anyone had ever seen.  There would always be some people who want it to rain and some people who don’t.  There’d be some people who want it warmer and some people who want it cooler.  There’d be some people who wanted some wind and other people who want it calm.  There’d be no pleasing everyone, no matter how hard anybody tried.

And so, we’re really better off leaving the weather in God’s hands.  And that’s true of a lot of things in life, when you think about it.  We love to think we know best, but there are an awful lot of times that we don’t.  In fact, there are an awful lot of times when it seems like we don’t know anything.  That’s probably why Jesus told us, in the Lord’s Prayer, to pray, “Thy will be done.”  Not “my will be done.”  Not someone else’s will be done, either.  “Thy will be done.”  Our own will is likely to wrong a lot of the time, even when we have the best of intentions.  God’s will is always true and right and perfect.

So the weather will do what it will, and we’ll all find a way to deal with it.  And a lot of other things will be what they are, too, and we’ll all find a way to deal with them as well.  If we just do our best and turn things over to God, we’ll probably find out that, in the end, things will work out all right.