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Rain Like Horses

The clouds mount up, dark and ominous, like great muscled stallions, ready for war. I stand in my yard on my dead grass and watch them, waiting.

A lightning bold jabs swiftly into the wounded sky, but I am too far away to hear it groan. All around me, those horses circle, thundering to the back of me and charging like a single, solid sheet to the front of me.

But my yard opens its yellowed mouth and not a drop falls in.

“That’s the thing about the desert,” I say to the kids. “It can be flooding in one part of town while the other part is bone dry.”

A single fat rain drop plummets to the ground and vaporizes on the burning cement. At least it could have fallen on the grass, I mumble to myself. I gaze up at the burning yellow orb hovering just above my house and I think about how much I really don’t want to water my lawn that night, and how much everything would be so much better if it would just rain, even a little.

I have lived in the desert just long enough to know that here, the earth holds its breath for rain. Days and weeks go by without a drop, then all of a sudden God throws open the gates of heaven and lets his steeds run free. They thunder down to the earth with the sound of a thousand hoof beats, and are gone.

The grass is watered and the cacti flower and the people in the puddles are reminded that there is a God in heaven who causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. But on the other side of town, where the horses didn’t run, the people stand on parched ground and wonder why God held back the reigns for them.

I looked at the spot where the raindrop fizzled. “I should be grateful for that drop,” I chastise myself. Even one drop is better than nothing.

Another drop falls. It is not exactly a war horse, but I get out a wash bin and put it under the eaves as an act of faith. Maybe it will rain enough to drip off the shingles so I can water the flowers tucked under the roof, close to the house.

Then the horses come, slowly at first, as if to find their way, then charging in at full force. The waters fill my pathetic little wash bin and trample the thirsty grass. I put another bucket out, and another, but those are overflowing before I can grab any more.

God has let his cavalry run right through my backyard.

I run too, trying to collect all the water I can because tomorrow, it will be dry again. Tomorrow, the rain will stop and I’d better be smart enough to get it while I can.

But I can’t contain it. I do not have enough empty containers to fill with the water that is pouring down on my house. I dump hand-me-down shoes out of plastic storage bins and fill those too, but the rain keeps coming and I am soaked.

It rains all day. Then the next. And the next. Great pools of water form in the hollows of the desert. The horses rush together in a foaming frenzy and course through dry riverbeds in a blur of motion. Everything that was empty has been filled up; everything that was dry has been saturated.

And I am out in my yard with buckets and bins, looking every bit like a widow who has cared for a growing boy through famine years, who thinks her son might die even while filling every last vessel in her home with oil while a prophet pours.

I am ashamed, just a little, at my attempts to hoard God’s provision as if I would run out. The water drips down my hair and off my chin, it gathers in herds in my yard, and there I stand in the rain, trying to save a bit of it in a blue plastic bin.

Here I am, with all my jars filled, and I realize something about God that I should have known before: I should fear overflowing more than I fear running out. God does not run out.

I do.

I have limited his hand because my mind tells me what God can do and my faith doesn’t have the guts to disagree.

I stand in the rain, drenched to the core, and I am reminded that God is not limited by my limitations. He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, more than I could ever ask or imagine. He can command the horses of heaven to charge swiftly through the desert. He can make oil flow from clay jars.

He can even refine a rain-soaked child with just one lick of fire.

The rain is still coming, and I nothing to put out except the jar that is cracked and brittle, the one that I hold back because I don’t believe it can ever really be full. But it’s under the eaves today, and the rain is coming faster than the cracks can let it out.

It is raining horses, and I am overflowing.

Home

In my mind, I live in house that has stood longer than I have, built by hands that lived before my time. The floor creaks and the stairs are warped from generations of feet climbing up and down, softly wearing their reflections into the wood.

Ancient trees reach out arthritic hands to knock on the windows when the winds blow up, and out in the orchard, I can spend hours under gnarled apple trees and watch as the fruit swells fat and ripe. Decades have passed since shovels broke the dirt and turned the soil and sank saplings into the earth as a kind of security for the years to come.

This place, this home I imagine, is a place of generational blessing, where babies are nursed in the same rooms they grow up in, and the same rooms they sleep in when they come back with children of their own. Here, change is never sudden and new is measured in years, not hours or minutes. Each passing season brings a deepening in me—a peaceful settling in, the way a house settles in to the earth until it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

I long to be home like that, where home is a part of me, like the skin I live in.

But I’ve never had that.

And I never will.

All my life, I have been transplanted just as soon as the roots have started to wriggle deep into the soil. Once a handful of memories are created, they are packed up and moved on to a new place that doesn’t feel like mine, that doesn’t feel like me.

And every single time, I feel like a bit of plankton, floating about in a great big sea, with no idea what part of the blue is up, and what part of the blue is down, and all I want to do is plant myself somewhere for a great long time.

But the waves won’t let me.

It is my calling, and I know it, to be always a stranger, always a sojourner, always longing for a place to return to that does not exist. In a sense, everywhere is home, and nowhere, all at once.

My heart breaks over it sometimes. I want a place of my own, a little corner of the earth to claim and tame, subdue and improve. I want a little kingdom here, and I grieve when I realize that I will not have it, that my children will not have it.

There is no house. There is no land. There are no generational memories to make or keep and no spreading fruit trees by which to mark the seasons. There is no home.

At least, not here.

But on the other side of time and space there is a haven for my homeless heart. “I go to prepare a place for you,” He said, and my heart leaps when I read the words because I am a woman without a place. Those words are a precious promise to someone like me.

Just for a minute, I close my eyes and forget my wanderings, so I can see it. Nestled in among ancient trees is a house built by the Father who desires to be my rest. The staircase is worn smooth by the feet of the One who waits for me, His Bride, to come home, to be home. I think there must be moss on the garden stones and a fire on the hearth and a thousand memories held in by the walls, as if I have been there all along because it was meant for me, all along.

It is home.

All the longings of my earthly shell, every godly dream left unfulfilled, is there perfected and redeemed. Not a single sacrifice or service has gone unnoticed. It is all repaid in glorious abundance and loving detail. Even the waiting breaths, the questioning and tearful prayers, the years of doubts and fears and unrealized dreams—are there restored to me as if none of it was ruined or wasted.

Home. It is a true home from which I can never be uprooted Nothing can steal away the memories I’m storing up there, because all of it, past, present, and future, is built into that place. All of it is part of the story of that place, that home, and I am a piece of it. There will be no good-byes, no pulling away, no awkward beginnings, only—always—belonging.

This hope of heaven, this hope of home, is so glorious that even a small taste of it is better than anything I’ve found on earth. I must believe that if my wanderings leave me longing for heaven and dissatisfied with earth, then let me wander, and let me ache.

For surely, it is better to ache for heaven than to be content with earth.

Surely, it is a gift of God to wander anywhere that leads me closer to home.

The Truck Didn’t Come

We woke up early because it was the day a semi-truck promised to pull down our street, big and bright and beautiful to two boys who still had a week of being four left in their bodies. Semi-trucks are always worth getting up early for, especially if they intend to park right in front of your house, close enough to touch.

The kids scrambled out of bed and stood in the empty living room, noses to glass, waiting.

But the truck didn’t come.

They pulled themselves away from the windows long enough to devour cold cereal from four borrowed bowls and a mug. Then they raced upstairs to put on shorts and t-shirts so they could stand under the hot sun and bake a little on the sidewalk while they waited. Any second now, it would be here.

But the truck didn’t come.

Jeff packed up the folding table and chairs we’d checked out from the military lending closet at Ft. Bliss and filled the minivan full to bursting with the foam mattresses we had been sleeping on all week. The kids followed him to the garage, begging to be allowed to use them to slide on down the stairs just once before he took them back.

“Don’t you have a truck to watch for?” he said as he stumbled out the door. They watched him go and listened for the rumble of eighteen wheels barreling down our street.

But the truck didn’t come.

Lunch came and went and so did every entertaining activity we could think of to do in an empty house. A few discarded Matchbox cars spun idly to a stop on the bare floor, wheels to the sky, mimicking the dead June bugs the boys were collecting in the garage. I bought a necklace I didn’t need online and Jonathan burned pricker bushes with his magnifying glass. Faith read the same book for the fifth time.

But the truck didn’t come.

Long into the afternoon we waited, watching the shadows of the neighbors’ houses stretch out across our lawn like lazy cats.

Suddenly, the shrill call of the phone broke the silence.

“How is the move going?” asked the chipper voice of our moving coordinator. She reeked of happiness, the exclusive kind of happiness that comes from sleeping in one’s own bed the night before.

“Um…they’re not here yet,” came my reply.

“What?”

“They haven’t arrived. Our stuff hasn’t arrived.” I let my mind wander to a thought of my beautiful bed, and sighed.

“Oh. JustasecwhileIchecksomething.” She rushed to hang up the phone and left me listening to the hum of the dead receiver.

The truck was not going to come.

I knew it even before the moving-coordinator-who-got-to-sleep-in-a-real-bed called me back and told me so. I knew it, but I could hardly believe it. It seemed a cruel trick to play on a woman who had been sleeping on 2 inches of foam for days when she wasn’t even camping.

I wanted to cry. How could I get settled without our stuff?

I thought back. Three weeks before, that truck had pulled away from our house, loaded down with all the things we call ours. Everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard and bubble wrapped and inventoried so we’d half-know what to do with it when it arrived on the other end of a seventeen hundred mile journey to our new home.

Which one of you has my stuff?

I had stood by a window and watched as the crew slowly drained my house of all its possessions. I thought of my new house, which was two-dimensional in my mind, flat like a photograph of a place I had seen but never really been. It was hard to imagine what it would actually be like, and harder to imagine how I would make it feel like I belonged there.

“How do you make a place feel like home?” a friend had asked, but I fumbled at the answer.

“I’m not really sure,” I said.

“Some people like to hang up curtains right away,” she offered, but we looked at my windows, still curtainless after five years in the house, and we both knew that wasn’t my thing.

“I guess I’ll just get unpacked as quickly as I can,” I told her. “I think once all of our stuff arrives and I get unpacked, it will feel like home.”

But the truck hadn’t come.

And all of the things I had counted on to make a house a home where stuck somewhere between Washington and Texas.

Except six.

That night, those six people sat around a rickety card table in an empty house and shared a beautiful meal made by a new friend in honor of what we thought would be our moving-in day. It was a meal the kids declared the best thing they’d ever eaten because my ability to microwave soup and Minute Rice were no match for Mrs. Harvey’s baked spaghetti and homemade bread.

We wrestled the black foam mattresses back up the steps after driving back to the military installation to re-borrow them, and arranged all five kids in the largest room. Sleeping on foam mattresses in a great big room is loads of fun when you are not yet old enough to know that sometimes, you wake up and your back hurts. Giggles erupted down the hallway as Faith recounted our made-up leprechaun stories and Micah declared Paul the winner of his stinky foot contest.

It occurred to me, as I arranged my bones over my borrowed bed, that home is not about the stuff.

It’s about the story. And all the time I had been waiting for our stuff, the story was already being written.

God has opened up a fresh new page and started writing the words He loves to write: “In the beginning…”

It is beautiful to be in the beginning with God, to be nestled into the pages of the story He’s writing for us and to know that we are wanted right where we are. Any other place on this earth would never feel like home now, whether all of our boxes arrived or not, because God is not writing the story anywhere else. He is writing it here.

(With the exception of my bed), none of the stuff really matters. We are here. We are safe. We are together. And we have one grand adventure unfolding right before our eyes.

Home is where the story is written. It is the place where God molds the characters and reveals the plot. It is where His story becomes our history.

This story, so full of the thoughts and intentions of God, will be told around angel fires long after the stuff has crumbled into dust.

The truck didn’t come. But the story is off to a great start.

Finally!

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