Our normal seasonal patterns seem to have gone a bit haywire. Drought, fires, floods and hail are all happening around the nation. For us locally, our 1-in-100-year drought has been hard to endure. Farmers on the long paddock and bare ground everywhere are a telltale sign just how serious things are.
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I have been praying for rain regularly, as has our church. However, I do wonder if drought is a helpful reminder of our lack of ultimate control and issues of our mortality. I also wonder if God has written into his creation a capacity to force us to consider these realities that we have no answers to, to point us to where true hope is found in a broken world.
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In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, there is a poem about the different times in our lives. It speaks about a time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to laugh. The point of the poem is to show us how little control we have over most of the times in our lives. The fact that most times in life we don't choose. After all, none of us would choose the current time of drought.
In another Old Testament book, Job faced considerable hardship and suffering, losing his livestock, family and health. Yet he responds with these words: The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, and also shall we accept good from God and not trouble. After reading Job, you realise that God wastes nothing, not even the worst things in Job's life, strengthening and refining him.
In times of drought we need the God of Job and the faith of Job, because that's the only place true hope is found in a broken world.
The most amazing thing about Job's God is that in the New Testament, back at the first Easter, God becomes the sufferer. Jesus entered the driest place, the cross. He was stripped, beaten, and put to death to end the drought of sinful people's separation from God. He died to rain on us forgiveness and life eternal. Sometimes it takes things like droughts to humble us and get our attention, in order to help us see how wonderful this hope is.
