When The Rain Comes

When I think of my childhood, some of my favorite memories are those times when my siblings and I would run around and play in the rain (of course we got in trouble for it!). I loved playing in the rain; it was such an exhilarating feeling to feel the raindrops on my face and get all soaked up while running around playing.

I still love the rain 🙂 . Rain signifies many different things. One of the significance of rain is blessings. It could signify God’s blessings on the earth or on his people. Sometimes, when we pray we even ask God to open the gates of heaven and let his rain come on us.

Well when the rain comes, what next? What do we do while it’s raining?

When God’s blessings are upon us and we are flooded with an abundance of it all, what do we do? These blessings could be an abundance of knowledge and wisdom, wealth, ideas, skills, spiritual gifts, etc.

Sometimes, the rain of God’s blessings come upon us but we do not make ourselves benefit from it as much as we should. Think about a farmer, for instance, if he goes to God praying for rain to come without first planting some seed in the soil, when the rain comes and goes he’ll still have no harvest because he didn’t prepare for the rain. The thing about rain is it’s seasonal – it’s going to come and go – it doesn’t last forever. There’s going to be times when there’ll be an overflow of God’s blessings and other times when it feels really dry. There’s going to be times of abundance and times of lack because there is a season and a time for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1). That’s why during our times of abundance, we have to prepare for the times of lack. During the time of rain, we have to store up for the time of dryness. This is what a wise and discerning person will do – as Joseph was (Genesis 41). So how do we do this, how do we take the most advantage of the rain when it comes?

• Prepare Your Heart

Sometimes, God sends his blessings upon us but our hearts are just not ready to receive them yet. Maybe because we have our own idea on how those blessings should come which is totally different from how they actually come or maybe because our hearts are just hardened. Either way, if our hearts are not prepared to receive God’s blessings, they’ll come and go and we’ll just miss them. So we need to prepare our hearts by opening them up to God.

• Prepare Your Mind

Just as we harden our hearts sometimes, we also limit God by having barriers in our minds. These barriers are most times fed into our minds by the things we let get into it – through what we listen to or what we see. If our minds are full of things that make us doubt and have unbelief, then we are really limiting God and he wouldn’t bless us as much as he wants to because we don’t let him (see Matthew 13:58).

• Sow the seed

Just like the farmer who has to sow seeds in order to benefit more from the rain, we also have to sow seeds in order to benefit more when God’s rain comes upon us. When the rain comes, the seed blossoms and grows. It multiplies and becomes much more than what was planted. Whatever blessings you are expecting from God, you should sow a seed of the same manner so that it can be multiplied. You can’t expect to sow an orange seed and harvest apples. If you want love, you have to sow love, time – time, service-service, money-money etc.

• Put Away the Umbrella

Sometimes we don’t get to benefit from the rain because we might be holding up an ‘umbrella’. This could be sin we’re not repenting from or maybe just powers of darkness that wouldn’t let us benefit from the rain. If it’s sin, we have to repent totally from it and if it’s the latter, we have to pray fervently against it.

God’s rain will definitely come because there is a time for everything and it will certainly rain when it’s time to rain. However, when the rain does come, it wouldn’ rain forever so we should make the most out of it when it does come.