Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Mud Rain: A Holy Week Object Lesson

As you can tell by our lack of posting, we've been busy. Last week was Holy Week filled with extra church services and times to remember the last week of the life of Jesus. On top of that, I came down with a killer cold and am just starting to feel better. We do have plenty of posts we need to update you on, but they will come one at a time.

In the last post I told you about our April Fool's Day snowstorm and how it was such a good thing to clean our cars. What was the big deal with dirty cars? Here's a picture before the dirty car mess started. The calm before the dirtiness.

My back windshield. This picture doesn't nearly do justice to the mess. Let's just say I could hardly see out of my back window it was so messy with gunk.


Our cars were covered in the stuff. Since my car is the same color as the mud, you can hardly see how dirty it was, but believe me, it was nasty stuff.

So why all the mess? We had two days of mud rain! Have you ever heard of mud rain (aka dirty rain) or experienced it before? I hadn't. Nothing like another new weather experience! Our mud rain was caused by extremely windy conditions in the desert west of us. This wind caused all of the dust to be stirred up and carried in the rain. Because the temperatures were cool and the humidity high, the dust stuck to the rain as it fell. It literally was white or tan colored rain falling from the sky! (I still have to wash my black umbrella from the mess!)

So two days of mud rain and then two days of white snow to wash it all away. God gave us a great object lesson during Holy Week. The mud rain was a reminder of our dirt, imperfections, and shortcomings. We fall so short of what God asks of us. Nothing we can do will ever allow us to measure up to God's perfection. Then the perfectly white snow came as a reminder of how He cleans and purifies us from all of our imperfections. And in case we weren't paying attention, we got a second snowstorm to remind us that it is He who makes us whiter than snow....blotting out all of our transgressions.

Despite my grumblings about the weather, it was a neat visual reminder of God's saving work.

2 comments:

MacKenzie said...

I've never heard of mud rain but it doensn't seem pleasant. When I lived in Korea we had yellow dust from china come over and then it rained. We thought the rain would help wash it away but somehow it just caused it to fuse to our cars, bikes, houses - everything. It was awful. I'm glad the snow worked to clear things up.

Carrie said...

Yeah, I can remember dust storms like that when I lived in Beijing, except I remember it turning everything orange.