Dear Friends,

Children try to wish the clouds away with a chant. In the past, Native Americans performed rain dances wearing feathers and turquoise. One rain ritual of Eastern Europe involves a girl dressed in vines or leaves dancing through the village, and another ritual has children floating a clay figure in a lake, river, or well.

Funny how some think a little sing-song will control the weather. Even stranger is that in the same place some are praying for rain, others are praying against it. But it is God alone who controls the rain.

“Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives?” (Job 38:25–26).

The same sudden rainstorm in the American South­west can be both an answer to prayer for the farmer with dying crops and a reason for prayer for the hiker caught in a flash flood. Somehow, God works supernaturally through both the natural and the miraculous to accomplish His purposes in multiple, interwoven lives.

Thought for Today: What seems paradoxically impossible to us is child’s play to our God.