Wet Wet Wet

I got soaked to the skin tonight because of the heavy downpour - and am feeling a bit under the weather as a consequence. On Wednesday evenings, I usually leave my car at the center and walk to church for the 6 p.m. Mass - saves me the hassle of finding a decent parking space (Redemptorist Wednesdays = jampacked church) and I get to exercise my peripatetic inclinations (thinking while walking and walking while thinking). But anyhow, good thing I toted along an umbrella, because once Mass was over, the heavens opened up and loosed the floodwaters upon the earth!

I love walking in the rain - even the pouring rain - but my footwear (espadrille-style heeled slippers!) was far from appropriate and the lightning was terrifying. You read that right. AG may be photographically-fascinated by bolts of nature's electricity zapping through the night sky and I might have been enthralled more than a few times by spectacular lightning-and-sound displays (from a distance!) but it's not cute walking in the pouring rain with lightning flashing all about you and your red umbrella! I think I jumped ten meters every time the sky lit up around me - dude, I was scared, and I sure had good reason to be! Wouldn't have wanted to end up a charred piece of Honey (with ruined espadrille-slippers to boot).

But throughout the difficult 15-minute walk ("slush" is more like it) from the Project 6 church to the center, my inner being was calm (although all my senses wanted to pee in their pants) because my spirit was singing:

Shelter me, O God
Hide me in the shadow of Your wings
You alone are my hope

And He did. Every time the heavens flashed and I cringed under the flimsy fabric of my umbrella, I would burst out into song, and He calmed my interior storm.

When my foes surround me
Set me high above their reach
Hear me when I call your name
Shelter me, O God

And even as I braved the rising floodwaters, was assaulted by power outages along the way, and nagged at by the fear of leptospirosis, He held me near.

Though I walk in darkness
Through the needles eye of death
You will never leave my side
Shelter me, O God (Psalm 16)

As I took yet another detour to get back to the least wet road, He responded to my song with His own:

Do not be afraid, I am with you.
I have called you each by name.
Come and follow me
I will bring you home;
I love you and you are mine.

And through the darkness of strange alleys, the pounding rain, and the rivers of floods, I saw the clean white lights of the center beckoning me - calling me home, sheltering me from the madness of the clean white lightning outside.

Truly, He brought me home; I love Him and I am His.

Tomorrow, Montalban. I pray to do His will in that place and for those people I have also grown to love.