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The rain put me to sleep but the thunder woke me.
I was up late last night, carrying the burdens of the world on my shimmering shoulders: crumbling relationships, broken hearts, failing health all around me. Through the seemingly interminable day, everywhere I looked I saw gray skies, threatening clouds, and trouble.
Sometime in the wee hours, I reluctantly dragged myself to bed. It was raining. The rain beat a steady rhythm against the windowpane mere feet from where I lay with my ear ringing off the hook. A couple of weeks ago, my ear started ringing or whistling or screaming. I have struggled to describe it perfectly. It is a constant high-pitched sound that never ceases. The best description I can come up with is this: It sounds like a screaming, pissed-off cricket is trapped under my eardrum. When all the conversation dies down, the television is put to bed, the music turned off, and the world sighs itself into silence, I hear the screaming of the cricket.
I lay there on my side, the problem ear squashed into my pillow in a futile attempt to quieten the cricket, and listened to the rhythm of the falling rain. In my head, I sang a country song from a lifetime ago.
“Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain telling me just what a fool I’ve been. I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain and let me be alone again.”
I did not wish for the rain to go away. I welcomed its song. I concentrated on its round, imagined myself dancing in the dark, arms outstretched, face to the shapeless sky, letting the rain wash away the stains of a troublesome day.
And I slept, deep and dreamless.
The same windowpane that served as the instrument to play my lullaby vibrated with the loud thunderclap that woke me a scant 5 hours later. It was like a nearby gunshot or maybe a grenade. A thunderous chorus, more distant and dissonant, echoed its ballad of another stormy day.
Life is like that. There will be days of thunder and nights of screaming crickets. The rhythm of life is still there, tapping out its steady, hopeful promise on the windowpane of your life. But you have to listen for it. You have to drown out the dissonance to find the design.
Whenever I am beset by days like this, I try to remember a handful of things. Maybe you will find them helpful and hopeful.
1. Your life is not lived in a moment. The worst moments of life can be so overwhelming and hurt so bad, it is easy to forget the good that preceded it and will come again and is there, even in your troubles, though it may be lost in the thunder and the crickets.
2. God never said and never will say, ‘I didn’t see that one coming.’
3. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28. That is either true or it isn’t. The term “all things” has no limiter, governor, or exclusions. There is no fine print or lawyerspeak hidden inside it.
4. I can fix what I can fix and I cannot fix what I cannot fix, even by fretting and worrying over it.
5. God may not change my circumstance until my circumstance changes me.
6. I can be bitter or I can get better. I cannot do both.
The rain won’t last forever. The thunder will quieten when the clouds roll away. The sun will shine again. But the cricket? It may chirp a lifetime, which makes it challenging but not impossible to listen to the rhythm, the music, the promise of life.
“The screaming never stops and it is hard to tune out. You just have to tune into something better to drown it out.”
