What is your favorite color?

"What is your favorite color?" I have never heard the answer to this question to be, "brown." Maybe blue, pink, purple, yellow....never brown. After months of virtually no rain, I will tell you that my favorite color is green. The grass is brown, the bushes are brown, the weeds are brown, the flowers are brown, and even the Yuccas are brown and flowerless. The land is parched and the dirt cracks under your feet.

We've had four days in the past week with afternoon showers. There have been many, many days of clouds and lightning and sheets of rain in the distance, but only four days when we actually had any drops of water at our house. Two of the days it was literally a few drops, and two days we actually had enough to wet the ground and even make some puddles in the dirt.

After this little amount of rain, some green has begun to peek through in a few spots. Sunflowers are now growing along the sides of the road, and the weeds are green again. The grass has patches of green. The entire land seems softer and lusher. The folks here I have talked to about the dryness, have told me that the ground here is incredibly responsive to any moisture. Never has green looked so good.

Nearly every day whenever rain has been around the area in any spot, we see giant rainbows outside. It is usually a full one-- where you can see both sides of the giant semicircular bow. The colors are so bright that we can see the colors distinctly-- even the shades of indigo and violet are visible and recognizable as two very different colors. It is a breathtaking sight.

I was thinking of how the weather relates to us as humans. The dry seasons of our lives leave us feeling parched and cracked and susceptible to fire that will consume whatever dry pieces of us we have left. We, like the Southern Colorado land, can be incredibly responsive to moisture as well. Maybe today we can be the water for someone who is in a drought. Maybe with a kind word, a smile, or a listening ear we can sprinkle a little refreshment. We might find that with some simple moisture, the parched ones of us can feel less likely to combust and more likely to look up and be overwhelmed by something bigger than us and breathtakingly beautiful.

Proverbs 11:25 "A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed."