drizzled love.

I love feeling the rain fall on my skin. I walk across campus, smiling, and thanking God for something to remind me I'm alive.

I was thinking about that on my way to class this morning. I've always loved rain, and snow, and sun, because I can feel them. They are physical realities, and though I don't understand how they work (someone does), or why they work (no one does), I can feel them. I lift my face to the rain, and feel it streaking across my cheeks, and I know that I'm alive.

I have this favorite sermon. It's called "God Chose You!" and Lindell gave it way back in October, and I have probably heard it hundreds of times. I could give the first couple of minutes of it verbatim, right now. In the sermon, he points out that before coming to Christ, we're dead. Actually, he asks the crowd, and they all shout out "Dead!" You can't pick out your coffin, he says, you don't get to pick anything, because you're dead.

I've always felt a little more deeply than do the people around me, it seems. And in the church, I get bowled over by things like the implications of speaking in tongues, or the enormity of God. It's as though there's a threshold beyond which my emotional circuits short, and I'm overwhelmed. The Truth is too huge, too much. I'm afraid I'll get lost in it. Reminds me of that new song by Needtobreathe, "I can't figure out just how much air I will need to breathe when Your tide washes over me."

In the rain this morning, I realized that though the Truths I'm seeing are overwhelming me, they are exactly what I've been looking for. My spirit finds joy in the immensity of life, of the sensation of being alive. My whole life, I've been seeking life. In all sorts of crazy ways.

In college, I partied to feel alive. I thought if I could get out of my self, if I got drunk enough, or danced for long enough, I could feel alive. And sometimes, I got close for a few seconds. I would look around the room, at all of my friends jumping up and down to the beat around me, and it was as though the whole world would slow for a moment. The haze would clear. And I'd feel it. I'd feel that perfect moment of clarity, and connectedness--Emerson called it being "part and particle of God." It never lasted. It couldn't. It wasn't true.

I've read to feel alive. But while Emerson, and Thoreau, and Eliot, and Hesse, and all of the favorites, while they can all write of truth, no lasting life can come from their pages.

I've sought out life, and been unable to find it. Now, I see it, and am terrified by it.

And the pieces continue to slide in to place.