Wait for the Rain

Not that it's been dry here the past week or so... we did indeed have snow-like sleet accumulation on the rooftops last weekend for Easter--cold and wet just like every other Easter of my (mostly) Northern life, when I have come to the South for some HEAT, dammit!--and the rain on Monday meant that the crushed concrete one of our volunteer workcrews was layering into a pit for a client's driveway turned into a quicksand soup.

No, "Wait for the Rain" ain't a weather report down here--it was the theme of Rev. Don's sermon yesterday evening at the Wednesday night prayer and Bible study service at First Missionary Baptist. Don is my co-worker and a UCC pastor, but his was a traditionally religious African-American upbringing in the Carolinas, so when he's in town he attends and sometimes preaches at 1st Missionary.* And every Monday and Tuesday, he spends an hour or so rehearsing with the week's workcrew, teaching them a few African-American spirituals so that they can sing at the Wednesday night service. Watching all these white folks, who are used to a more staid, reserved worship style, stand up in front of the church and attempt singing, swaying, and clapping all at the same time, it never fails to strike me as a strange combination of earnestness and entertainment--a heartfelt offering by the workcampers to the community they are serving, and a source of well-concealed mirth for their black brothers and sisters sitting in the pews and politely nodding their heads and clapping along--I'm sure they must wonder what in the Good Lord's name these white people are doing trying to sing songs of a style wrought in the fiery furnaces of slavery, an institution of complicity for the forefathers and mothers of their race.
Some weeks go better than others, musically speaking; but because it is well-meant, the whole production is always well-received. Oh, and I forgot the kicker--Rev. Don always accompanies this crack choir on an electronic keyboard, playing in whatever key it is that is made up of all black notes. No matter what the song is or what key it was originally intended to be sung in. It's a trip.

Now that the stage is set:
Don is a rather quiet, reserved sort of man in large group settings--he is the one who will sit back and wait until directly called upon to make a contribution. But get him into a pulpit, and he lets go. I've literally seen him shimmy-shake across the chancel and run laps around the aisles, and if there's a sermon going, his own personal Amen chorus of Yeahs, Wells, MmHmms and Halleluuuu-jahs! can be heard all over the sanctuary. Last night he was filling in for Rev. Dickie, who was preaching at a revival down the street (more about that later), and when he took the microphone to preach about Elijah's prophecy that the drought he had called down upon wicked King Ahab's land was about to end, proving God's supremacy to the deity Baal, he called to mind one of those Hollywood-movies-in-30-seconds skits: back and forth, back and forth he pantomimed EACH ONE of Elijah's servant's seven trips to the mountaintop to see if rain was coming. There is something of a storyteller in Don, methinks.
Anyway, Elijah has heard the sound of an "abundance of rain," and Elijah's servant finally spots a cloud the size of a man's hand--and that sent Don off into a Spiritual Weather Report about outlasting your soul's dry spells, faithfully waiting for God's blessings to water your soul. His message resonated particularly for me, as I've just been through my own spiritual drought and I feel like coming to serve on the Gulf Coast was exactly what my parched soul needed. I could feel the individual water droplets plunking down onto the cracked earth--the story a workcamper shared about the astonishment of seeing a little boy who had been living in a crowded, unsanitary FEMA trailer run into a freshly dry-walled room and exclaim "I have a room!"; witnessing the transformations volunteers undergo in their short time working here; the humbling, overpowering ability to pick up my phone when someone calls on behalf of a family stranded, destitute, in a campground, and put them through to our caseworker, our SuperWoman, who can help them even though I can't; the profound peace of a simple beachside Maundy Thursday service with new, compassionate friends; the sight of a pelican or a great blue heron taking off, startled by my morning jogs.
I had to wait a while for those raindrops, and I didn't always know if I was capable of receiving them in the same carefree way I had before, if I could return to the same way of believing that I had grown up with. But as Elijah promised it would, it came--first as a cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man's fist, then as a spring drizzle, then as a downpour of blessings that hasn't yet let up.

As they say at 1st Missionary Baptist: "God is good... Allll the time."


*There are no United Church of Christ congregations in the state of Mississippi. There used to be a handful, but they chose to integrate during the Civil Rights movement and, in addition to losing membership, their remaining congregants faced so much aggression and harassment at work and on the streets for their association with such a "radical" denomination that they felt they had to close those wide-open doors, or face even worse--bricks through windows, firebombings, etc. So much for "Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven."