Who Can Stop the Rain

     It was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school and some friends and I were headed to Hershey Pennsylvania for a concert festival for a few days.  It was a big festival called Creation that was usually held at Agape Farm in Pennsylvania, but because of the torrential downpours this particular summer, the farm land was flooded and so Hershey Park became the new venue.  This was fine with me, as the promise for Americas best chocolate, an amusement park and an entire museum dedicated to chocolate only sweetened the deal (see what I did there 😉  The stadium where the Hershey Bears played would now hold the crowd for the concerts.  It was going to be great.  But then the rain began again…

We rode in my friends RV with her parents from Mass to Pennsylvania and watched out the windows as the rain continued to pour down.  “Would the concert be cancelled once we got there?” we all wondered.  We stopped the first night and set up camp at a campground along the way.  There were about 8 to 10 of us teenagers all piled into this tent, laughing and talking late into the night when the rain began again.  It pounded on the outside of the tent and every now and then one of us would have to get up and push off the pools of water that were puddling on the roof, causing it to sag under its weight.  We were doing fine and the tent was holding up until the water started to fill up in the grass we were camping on.  The ground was so saturated it just couldn’t hold any more water.  We watched as water started to seep into the sides of the tent, soaking whatever was on the perimeter.  We all tried to move our sleeping bags away from the forming puddles.  There was talk about taking everything down and trying to sleep in one of the camp buildings for shelter, but we knew everything inside would get soaked anyway as soon as we stepped foot outside in the downpour.  The RV was full of sleeping adults.  We were stuck and none of us knew what to do.

The thought seeped into my brain as one of the rain drops seeped through the roof of the tent onto my forehead. We could pray for the rain to stop.  We literally were out of options so I figured it was worth a shot.  I knew God could do it and we really needed immediate help, so when I raised my voice to suggest to the group that we stop for a minute to pray, I did so with enthusiasm and confidence.  Everyone grew silent.  The rain continued to pound on the outside of the tent as I offered up my prayer to God to help us in our situation and please stop the rain so we could stay dry and get some sleep.  It was not going to be a long prayer as I am usually direct and to the point, but I didn’t even get halfway through the words I was thinking to say when, suddenly, the rain stopped.  It didn’t die down or go from pouring to raining to drizzling to sprinkling- it stopped, like abruptly, like someone had shut the faucet off.  We all sat in silence for a second, a bit dumbfounded and in awe when someone said, “Wow”, and it summed up what we were all thinking.  I finally said, I think I will pray one more time and thank God for doing that, and so we prayed a prayer of thanks and sleep came easy after that.

     It didn’t rain much more that trip from what I can remember.  There were a few more showers, like when Jars of Clay started to sing “Flood” and it started to downpour; the crowd went wild and we all danced together in the rain.  It was awesome.  We did the amusement park, toured the Hershey Factory, shopped at the outlets and enjoyed the concerts in between.  It’s still one of my favorite high school memories with friends.  But it was also another important miracle moment in my life that reminded me God is always near, and I could call on him for help when I needed Him.  For who can stop the rain? The one who started it of course.

Job 37:6

He says to the snow, “Fall on the Earth,” and to the rain shower, “Be a mighty downpour.”

Jeremiah 14:22

Do any of the worthless idols of the nations bring rain? Do the skies themselves send down showers? No, it is you, Lord our God.  Therefore our hope is in you, for you are the one who does all this.

Exodus 9:33

Then Moses left Pharaoh and went out of the city.  He spread out his hands toward the Lord; the thunder and hail stopped, and the rain no longer poured down on the land.