Color in the Brown

The rain is falling in Kansas City, a consistent, drop-heavy rain, slow but dignified, the kind that plays arrangements for piano alongside, broad in tempo and solemn. The sort that happens when skies are serious, as they always are in the Midwest--muffled and gray this time, but as they've been for what seems a long time. It would be easy to feel melancholy in such monotone, but there is color in that water. Spring is on the way!

And oh, the symbolism of spring!

It promises so much.

So there is more here. More than glum clouds and sobering, intentional rain. More than inconveniences in season, more than wishes for seaside skies and light prairie breezes, for distance from snow and ice and bitter, rakish winds. Because seriousness is brown. Brown like the mud generated from months of soaking, freezing, thawing and soaking again in intervals.

Brown like the kind found out on the plains, where gravel roads turn muddy--an all-consuming, breathing, moveable mass of wet, clinging-earth-muddy.

But there is color in all that brown!

Spring is on the way!

It is so close! So there is so much hope here in all this gray and water and mud. And maybe that is the way it's suppose to be, the way of design from the beginning. Snow and ice and cold to cause us to turn inward, and ultimately upward, the water and mud a transition filled with the promise that it won't always be that way. Brown the hope of sunny days--a reminder that the cycles won't always last. That one day color will return for good.

And so Kansas Citians celebrate the joy of rain today. It's colorless and persistent and wet and, in some places, oh, so brown. But we celebrate the vibrancy we know to be coming, the rainbows that are on the way to us, because of our patience in the rain.

There is a lot of supernatural symbolism in that, if you ask me. It's for those who choose to see it.

#milkandhoneyland #milkandhoney #faith #God #findingrainbowsinthewilderness #color #dynamicpurpose