Dear friends,
With the midterm elections looming, perhaps this reflection would have been better suited to warmer temperatures, with rain nowhere in sight. Here, in the Pacific Northwest, that’s all changed now. Rainfall is still below average for the year, but our liquid sunshine has arrived! Plants regained their luster, and the vivid green returned. Now, after walks, our dog Arlo looks like a wet mop, and drying him off becomes a chore. Still, I cannot help but think of something essential to us all — RAIN.
In many parts of the world, farmers watch and worry as the ground cracks at the edges, forming thin fault lines threading through the topsoil. Soil fractures grow large enough to dip a hand into. Ranchers and orchardists watch creek beds and irrigation ditches for weeks, remembering when their parents and grandparents said they ran full. Here in the Northwest, being wet was our claim to fame. Lush forests and greenery were everywhere! But no more. Though it's hard to imagine now, after a few days of drenching, the drought threat here is real. It happens slowly. Our heads and hearts take time to adjust.
Do our prayers for the weather matter?
While many wait in the dust rising from the cracked earth, a very old question rises with it: do our prayers for the weather matter? Seriously, I’d rather leave it to the meteorologists or the weather app on my phone. Why bother praying when Doppler radar has this one covered? In so many ways, I’m afraid my reliance on science has replaced my dependence on the Creator's goodness.
Then Elijah said to Ahab, “Go get something to eat and drink, for I hear a mighty rainstorm coming!” So Ahab went to eat and drink. But Elijah climbed to the top of Mount Carmel, bowed low to the ground, and prayed with his face between his knees. 1 Kings 18:41-42
Scripture speaks otherwise and offers no simple safeguard. After three rainless years, which Elijah prayed into being, he climbed Mount Carmel, bowed with his face between his knees, and sent his servant back seven times to search the sky for a cloud like a man’s hand. And James, centuries later, refuses to let that story shrink into legend: Elijah was human, just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not; then he prayed again, and the heavens gave rain (James 5:17-18). Notice what James is doing. He is not building a shrine to Elijah’s exceptional holiness. He is tearing it down so that ordinary, anxious, dust-covered people like us might dare to pray the same way.
“When the heavens are shut up, and there is no rain because they have sinned against You… then hear in heaven, and forgive the sin of Your servants, Your people Israel… and send rain on Your land which You have given to Your people as an inheritance” 2 Chronicles 6:26‑27
Solomon, dedicating the temple, went further still—he wrote a drought-prayer into the covenant’s constitution. When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain, he prayed: “When the people confess your name and turn from their sin, then hear in heaven, forgive, and send rain on your land.” In other words, rain was never meant to be a private transaction between an anxious farmer and a distant deity. From the beginning, it was tied to confession and turning—to a people examining what had gone awry in their life together.
“Ask the Lord for rain in the springtime, for he makes the storm clouds. And he will send showers of rain so every field becomes a lush pasture.” Zechariah 10:1–2
Zechariah makes the command explicit: ask the Lord for rain, for the Lord makes the storm clouds and gives showers to all people. But he does not stop at the command. He immediately names its shadow side — the diviners and idols that offer false comfort to those unwilling to ask. That is worth sitting with. Every generation builds its own idols to secure water without asking — irrigation empires that mine aquifers a thousand years deep in a single lifetime, industrial systems that treat topsoil as inventory rather than a gift, and economies that make our food cheap by stripping and over-fertilizing the ground that grows it. None of these are named as sins in our prayers of confession, yet all of them are exactly the kind of false comfort Zechariah warned against.
That is why the Lord says, “Turn to me now, while there is time. Give me your hearts. Joel 2:12
This is where the prophet Joel’s drought liturgy (Joel 1:14-2:17) becomes both uncomfortable and necessary. Facing locusts and dried fields, he does not call the people to grit their teeth and wait out the weather. He calls them to rend their hearts, not their garments—an inward tearing that must reach into how they live, not merely how they feel. In Joel, lament is never separate from repentance. And repentance, in an ecological crisis, cannot remain abstractly spiritual. It asks what habits, appetites, and systems we prop up that have made the land less able to hold water, bear fruit, and breathe.
“He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” John 5:45
Yet Jesus insists that the Father sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike and refuses to let anyone read a particular disaster as God’s precise scorecard for a particular sin. Rain is both a sign of God’s promise and a gift of grace to all. It cannot be reduced to a simple formula. We do not pray for rain because we have calculated exactly whose fault the drought is. We pray because all creation is groaning and because the Creator still delights in visiting the earth and watering it. God is crowning the year with his bounty, and that same Creator has always paired the asking with a summons to become people who trust God for rain and so much more!
So ask for rain — with Elijah’s boldness, the plainness of Zechariah’s command, and the wet-eyed honesty of Joel’s fasting. And while we ask, let the asking loosen something else in us. Let it move us toward soil we cultivate and enrich rather than exhaust, water we conserve rather than squander, and a table set with food that doesn't require the earth’s slow ruin to feed us. And let’s remember that a prayer for rain reaches into our wallets, gardens, grocery lists, and institutions. Solomon created a liturgy that shaped their way of life through temple worship, but the people had to put it into practice.
Ask boldly. Then live like someone who expects an answer.
