Me + Festival = Rain. Again.

You're welcome.

Once again, I went to a festival to promote The River. Once again, it had not rained in a long time. Once again, it poured. That makes me 5-for-5 since last August. Five festivals in a row that I have worked have been rained out. The three festivals I haven't gone to have been three perfect days. Yesterday, the festival was scheduled to end at 4:00. I showed up at 3:30 under cloudy but dry conditions. By 3:45 it was rained out and done. The other River folks who were there have now banned me from going to any more festivals. In fact, I have been instructed to bring a tent to Lake Lanier and have my own festival, thus replenishing our water supply.

Before I got there, we had a line 20 people deep. Check this pic out:

It was great to see a line of people trying to get to us! That was nice. So all in all, it was actually a good day. And I got to see this on the way home, which was also pretty cool.. According to Genesis, God sent a rainbow as a sign that God would never destroy the earth by flooding again. It would be tempting to think that this rainbow means that God will never destroy a festival by water again, but I think I'll stay away just in case. Far, far away.

When you can't even pray

We had a truly horrible day yesterday. My son (who will be three in October) broke his wrist. It should have been a lot worse. The brakes on his stroller gave way and he went down our driveway, over a retaining wall, hit the mid-level retaining wall three feet below (on the wall, not the dirt) and then bounced off it to land another three feet down on the grass below. He should have been hurt a lot worse, to be honest. I thought for sure he had been. I'm thankful it was only a broken wrist.

Today, when I was sharing with someone what had happened, she said "I bet there was a lot of praying." I would have expected the same thing, but as I thought about I realized that there weren't any. While it was all happening, I hardly prayed at all. Once I did, and that was because I was afraid we were going to run out of gas on the way down. But that was it. Just that once. A lot of words did come out of my mouth while this was happening, but they certainly weren't prayers. When he fell I skipped the PG-13 vocabulary and went straight to NC-17. My language was so filthy the neighbors probably thought the neighborhood had been invaded by pirates. But I didn't pray. Not once. Not until today, when the shock and terror had started to fade was I finally able to pray.

This is why I think it's so important for Christians to be together in times of trauma. When we can't pray, God gives us other people to pray for us. I wish someone had been there to pray with us. I was too addled and too filled with adrenaline to even think of that. I was so focused on my son that I couldn't think of anything else. Still can't. Work and the mundane activities of life seem so ludicrously unimportant that I have to force myself to do them, and even then I do them in a haze. But this also shows something important about God, which can be read in Romans 8:26. It reads "And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don't even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words."

Yesterday, I was unable to express my groanings in words. Only today am I somewhat able to do so. Yet the Spirit helps in our distress. I didn't know how to pray, or what to pray for: I had simply forgotten it all. My mind had gone numb, focusing only on my son. But the Spirit of God was there, praying for us when I couldn't. It's the only way to explain how this went from being a truly horrendous injury to just a broken wrist. And a minor break, at that.

God is there, my friends, whether you ask God to be or not. And when you absolutely cannot ask God to be there, as I couldn't yesterday, that is when God is most present. When we are at our weakest, God is strongest. And for that, I am truly thankful.

I have been to the mountaintop

I spent the last weekend on a retreat, called Via de Christo. That's Spanish for "The Way of Christ" (but I bet you knew that). This was a gift from some of the folks in The River- they invited me, drove me there, and even paid for me to go. And wow, was it some gift.

I get paid to share the love of God. That's pretty cool, and I am so thankful that I get to do that. But I don't get paid to feel the love of God. That's optional. But this weekend, I got to do that. I got to feel the love of God. To get wrapped up in it, to roll around in it, and to bask in it. I do this job to share that feeling with others, but I had forgotten how good it felt to feel it myself. It was refreshing, revitalizing, renewing. It was great.

It is also my hope for The River to be a way for lots of people to have similar experiences. Maybe through Via de Christo, but maybe not. The means is not the point, only that they get to feel it. That's what I want: for as many people as possible to feel the love of God like I did last weekend. Because God does love you! I felt the love. And it's really, really cool.