Dog walking in the rain: something spiritual

IT HAS BEEN RAINING all morning.

It hasn’t rained this way since I can’t remember when.

The ground has been thirsty. And I’ve grown weary of being stuck between blue skies and hard-packed dirt.

It’s the dead of winter, but I’ve been writing all morning with my window cracked open about six inches.

That’s high enough for Buddy the Dog to brush his nose against the wet screen, sniff the brisk air of outside, and watch for that sparrow that likes to drink from our roof gutter a few feet from my upstairs office window.

Buddy missed his morning walk. It was pouring and thundering.

But I walked him in the drizzle of noontime, beside the creek that has churned itself into a muddy rapids.

We stopped for a short while and watched the water splash and fly about the boulders.

We stopped again to watch a squirrel climb down a tree, headfirst. How do they do that?

Just back from the walk now, Buddy is sleeping on the floor beside me as I write. He smells wet, but I don’t mind.

I’m listening to the rain still splashing on the roof above our porch, outside my window.

And I’m wondering.

There’s something about a change in the weather that turns my thoughts to God.

It’s easy to forget him when every day is the same, as it usually is.

And it’s easy to blame him when the weather is extreme, as it sometimes is—especially in the blast furnace summers here in the Midwest.

But when there’s a gentle relief—a long-awaited soaking on a winter’s morning, or perhaps a clear sky when the stars and the full moon light the night, filling shadows with detail—my thoughts seem to turn automatically to the Creator.

The breathtaking world around us is the one evidence of God that I can’t understand how atheists miss.

Could something this wonderful come from nothing in particular?

Doesn’t even a Big Bang need someone to pull the trigger?

And what about that sense of deity and wonder that I sometimes experience as I walk with my Buddy in the prairie rain, or lean into the wind on a mountain, or stare into the night sky as it punches holes through the darkness?

Is that just chemistry at work inside my head?

Or is it the Spirit at work in my heart?

“By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen” (Hebrews 11:3, NLT).

But really, how much faith does it take to believe that?

Isn’t it obvious that just as someone must have made the computer on which I’m typing, someone must have made the universe in which we’re living?

I can’t work up the faith to believe that my computer snapped itself together in China. And I certainly can’t work up the faith to believe that something as complex as life throughout the universe emerged as the spit of a giant pop from out of nowhere.

One thing seems obvious, to me at least. There is more to life than physics.