By Sister Janis Yaekel, ASC
I have been writing this blog for a year now, and I sometimes wonder where the time has gone. Time flies when you’re having fun, and even when you’re not. The past year certainly has been more pleasant than not.
Out here in the farmland where I live, the corn is high and the ears are showing themselves. Driving down a country road the other day, I saw a doe and fawn that delighted my senses.
This is growing time in nature. Everything is about the process of taking the new life of spring and making it grow to maturity. Life was struggling for lack of moisture, but recent rains provided abundant moisture.
When rain falls in our lives, it may not always be welcome. Certainly, I didn’t welcome a cancer diagnosis. Yet, real interior growth, real maturity can happen only when we live through the rainy days of our lives.
Sometimes we do welcome the rain because it brings a change in life that is for the better. It may bring a fresh clean vision when we’d been thirsting for more.
A person gets laid off from a job, and realizes that in that loss, she has been set free to pursue the thing she had been afraid to risk without prompting.
Other times, a person may be clueless that new growth is necessary, and is devastated when the rain comes. There is a tendency to want to run from it or even deny it but the rain doesn’t let up. It just keeps coming, doesn’t it?
Cancer is a rain storm of huge proportion. We can’t run from it because it will just keep coming and denying it will not make it go away. Confronting it is not easy, but does lead to inner growth. We begin to see more clearly that which is important in life and how we’d like to live the time that we have.
Aging itself consists of a lot of small rain showers that build up over time. We begin to see the diminishment of our bodies. However, aging brings great wisdom as we let go of what once was in order to embrace the present moment of God’s revelation.
We begin to be freed up from all the silly limits that our social network tries to place upon us. We become more and more who we really are and that is good in God’s eyes.
The rains will come, whether as a disease, aging or tragedy, but so will the grace to grow through them.