Woke up last night in the small hours, as I do most days, and heard the sound of steady rain bearing down the tiled roof and dropping from the eaves on the pavement.
We have had many good rains the last two months, to the point that the annual golf-tournament-slash-roving-cocktail-party turned into a drunken proto-riotish mud bath that made the civic organizers question the validity of the overall concept going forward.
A couple nights a small front came down the the north in an inverted v-shape, the apex bearing down on us as we were out walking in the park and the soccer fields going down to Bell Road, to which I have gotten accustomed after the trauma of seeing the desert floor razed and graded.
The lightning was heavy in one wing of the v-shape. We could tell all this with Jessica's smart phone, on an app showing lightning strakes. I like leaving my phone at home when I can.
Now it is raining again. I can hear it out my window as I type. It is a sensual pleasure, like a space heater on a chilly morning, or a warm blanket. This being a season of repentance and fasting, I try to be aware of my desire for material comforts and sensual pleasures, and if possible to purposefully deny, or at least delay, myself the satisfaction of it. Or at least not jump to enjoy it so readily.
Waking up in the early morning hours then, with a rain outside and a warm blanket over me, must be God himself intervening, for it is little sense to get up at that hour. Perhaps tomorrow morning I will. I will go rise and go to pray, without making coffee yet, and certainly with no half-and-half until Easter---even to the Orthodox Easter this year. I will examine my sins and repent of them. In this is freedom.
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