Yored Geshem

After the long months of heat and dryness, "the early rains" have arrived on a parched and hardened land. To those accustomed to plentiful year-round rains, it is perhaps hard to understand the joy of the earth, much less the joy of one farmer. In Hebrew, "yored"=coming down, and "geshem"=rain. So when the sky is dark and overcast on Zavitan Street it is good news: the rains are about to come down. And the hard ground that was broken up during the heat of the summer...then enriched with lots of organic matter---is now capable of receiving and holding the precious waters from above. But hard ground, like hard hearts, can neither absorb the rain nor benefit from it---the rains can only run off. The LORD wants His rains to sink in, not run-off useless, but for the "sinking-in" to occur, He must first break up the hard, fallow ground of our hard hearts. Praise God, the early rains are not the end of the story---there is still time for our hardness to be broken before the "final" (or latter) rains come.