a summer shower

Eight thousand five hundred miles across the globe, Typhoon Glenda -- which for some weird reason is a namesake of a good friend of mine -- pounded the coasts of Luzon with bullet-sized raindrops and 170 kph winds.

Tired perhaps of the striking ironies of life in that vast archipelago I still call home, she headed for China, and left in her wake two dead, several thousands homeless, and a hundred or so UP students ecstatic.

Meanwhile, here in South Texas, the weather was exactly the opposite. The sun had become a monstrous yellow fireball that mercilessly beat down on our tired brown faces. The hot air hung like a curse, and tormented us with breezes that stung the skin.

But yesterday was different. The sun, nowhere to be seen, lay hidden behind a patch of gloom. A pillar of grey and brooding clouds cast a veil-like shadow on the landscape. For a long time it stood still there on the horizon, waiting, seemingly reluctant to release its precious cargo.

I was loading the laundry-filled hamper onto the car when little wet brown circles started mushrooming on the dusty asphalt. Halfway towards the laundry shop, the slow drizzle matured into a hearty rain. Rain!

Like a delighted child I peered through the car window and watched those thin silver streaks whisk past the car window. I closed my eyes and listened to the ceaseless pattering on the windshield, imagining those cold and rainy afternoons when I snuggled into the warm comforts of my grandmother's embrace and slept and slept.

When I got out to pick up the laundry at the trunk of the car, that distinctively musky and earthy after-rain smell flooded my nostrils. Sadly, I am not one of those who rank petrichor as their favorite smell. On the contrary, I find it -- which comes from the oily secretions of some plants and the spores of a certain kind of bacteria named actinomycetes -- horribly nauseating, like a cross between a Mideastern man's armpit and a musty cellar. So does my brother, by the way. Maybe it runs in the family. Hehe.

So I held my breath, quickly fled into the welcoming doors of Maytag -- the "homestyle" laundry shop, bragged the sign outside -- and watched as those airborne molecules from the Gulf of Mexico once again underwent that stage of the timeless water cycle called precipitation.

Ten minutes later, as quickly as it came, the rain was gone.

And then I remembered a verse each from the Psalms and the Gospel of Matthew. The first I picked up from one of John Piper's meditations on "the Pleasures of God" (Chapter 2, I think). The second I had underlined on my Bible during one of my quiet times before, hoping that it would stick to my mind much longer than a Post-it would to the smooth surface of a refrigerator door.

He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses. -- Psalm 135:7

He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. -- Matthew 5:45

I stared through the raindrop-spattered windows, past the steel wire fence in front of Maytag, past those scraggly mesquite trees and rusting roofs, into the pink and orange horizon and wondered.

Why would the sovereign and holy God of the Universe care to lavish such a precious gift as rain into rotting corpses such as we? Why would He even suffer His only Son to die a criminal's death on a wooden cross, for a race of puny beings who have so long lifted their hands against their Maker in rebellion?

How incomprehensible, but how wondrous, is that thing we call grace.