Re-entry Days

Rain, rain, come today. Come and wash my stains away.

Starting up the hill, I was plucking along on my four-weeks-out-of-shape legs, feeling the

slight burn in my chest, until it leveled out again near the sea where waves foamed gently in

the evening air and the crowds started to thin in the darkening light. Then the rain came. A

drop on my nose, one on the back of my shoulder, leaving me unsure if there was someone spitting high above where the embankment rose up from the boardwalk, or if a storm was pending. Minutes later the phantom spitter was acquitted and I welcomed the cooling downpour.

Just rain, you might say, but it felt like a baptism straight from the heavens above. I know He didn’t send that rain just for me tonight, but surely He speaks to me in it, using those cleansing drops pouring in rivers down the lines of my face as he poured spirit words from the Word into my soul.

It was a rough day. Re-entry can be like that sometimes. A husband gone long, now returned but spending his first hours shivering in bed on a hot and humid day, and an overly anxious wife with expectant eyes and nearly burst brain cells. It wasn’t the fairy tale homecoming I had been longing for.

The worst part of it is that I knew I would react wrongly. I knew something would happen in my over-eagerness of his return. And as he slipped and slumped into that aching, incapacitated state I felt the annoyance start to rise and I knew it wasn’t his fault but my eyes still stung with tears of weariness and disappointment as I hauled the kids outside for yet another day.

And at the end of the day when I had cried it out and we had talked it through I ran in that rain, wondering why it is that even when I know I am heading down the path of bitterness and begrudging and want to stop, I still nurse those inner feelings of entitlement and resentment.

And then that rain kept falling and the Spirit kept talking. Maturity doesn’t always look like sainthood, sometimes it looks like needy weakness on its knees. That’s not to say I am in that place… I still think my choices reflect immaturity most of the time. But rather than drive me away to despondency, I know I need to lift my face to look straight into the weeping eyes of heaven, letting those drenching, cleansing drops wash my filth away. Pride tells me to sit and nurse the day’s mistakes, but humility says this is my wrong and if it wasn’t for You it would leave me dirty and muddied. But admitted, it is washed clean over and over again. And I run clean, and wet with the memory of what it took to make me free.