Friday, July 15, 2005

All about the weather

We're in a drought. Contrary to popular myth, it will rain during a drought. It just won't rain everywhere and it won't rain very much. And oddly enough, you can even get a flood or two in the middle of a drought. That makes no sense on the surface, but it's true.

About the floods and rain in a drought; dry ground gets very hard and cracked. Along comes an isolated downpour and the water falls so fast it can't soak into the soil so it starts flowing. The result is a flood. A flood in the middle of a drought. In fact, the worse the drought gets, the more likely it is to flood.

And rain does fall during a drought. It just isn't distributed very well. Locally, we had more than an inch of rain the other day. Our crops responded to the drink with a flush of new growth. A few miles away, the crops are shriveled and pointed still searching the sky for relief.

I once interviewed a old Oklahoma farmer. The topic of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl came up and I asked him how he was able to stay and keep his farm when so many others had fled. He explained that "God just favored us, son. Each season we'd get a couple of those showers other places didn't get. It was just enough to make a part of a crop and we had just enough to keep the bills paid."

To compound the situation here, we've had high temps and some days of very low humidity. It's conditions just like this that makes me think about the nature of God. What caused the rain to fall over our little patch of earth the other day? We'll get crops. Without more rain, the yields are going to be cut. But we'll have a crop.

"God just favored us, son." I'll never forget it.

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