Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you. James 5:1-5. NIV.
On a certain day, a large raincloud gathered over the city. Inside the raincloud, the raindrops talked among themselves as to where they would like to fall. Some raindrops looked down and saw small puddles of water, puddles made up of water like themselves. They noticed how the raindrops like themselves sang as they fell towards the puddles and how the water splashed and flashed in the sun as they landed.
“That’s where we would like to land,” they murmured among themselves. We will join our brother raindrops in the small puddle, adding our water to theirs until the puddle becomes a mighty river of which all creation will take notice. And, singing a lusty song, these raindrops sailed through the cloud to the puddle splashing happily as they landed.
Except that the puddle was very shallow, and it had formed itself over a concrete driveway. Each raindrop that landed did so piercing the watery surface and painfully smacking the pavement, losing both its sensibility from the concussion and its identity in the press of its fellow raindrops.
As the puddle grew in size, the force of gravity acted upon each little raindrop until they all rolled off the driveway and into the drainage channel at the side. Stronger and stronger, gravity pulled the puddle of raindrops, gathering all manner of debris as it surged onward and downward toward its inevitable end, the storm sewer. And so, it did.
Meanwhile, in the cloud, the other raindrops looked down at the city and saw the green grass. “If we land on the green grass, we will no longer be ourselves, little raindrops,” they said, “but, perhaps we will find something that we can help to grow and, in that way, our fall will not be for naught.”
So, that’s what they did. The little raindrops resolutely and determinedly focused on the green grass in their perilous flight downward. So focused were they, that they forgot to make more than even a gentle whisper as they fell.
And the little raindrops landed on the Earth, cushioned by the blades of the green grass. They gently glided below the surface until they reached the roots of the green grass. Their moisture caused the green grass to grow. As the blades of green grass grew, they exhaled moisture back into the air until eventually, new rainclouds formed and more little raindrops appeared.
“And, what are we to take from this parable?” you ask.
The raindrops are like people. Some people always seek to make a splash, to be heard, to be noticed by all creation. Seeking to maintain themselves just as they are, to hold onto, and to perpetuate, what they have after their painful crash, they merge into a mass of like-mindedness until, the force of history, like gravity, pulls them downward en masse towards their ultimate end, the storm-sewer of antiquity, flowing out of Earth’s time-line into the sea of despair where they are lost, having never counted for anything and eventually losing all they ever had or were.
The second group of people is like the second group of raindrops. They seek not their ends but those of “the other.” They seek and find a manner in which they can nourish the other and make it grow. Their reward, after a tumultuous flight, is a soft landing, the hope that their sacrifice counted for something, and the knowledge that their “other-mindedness” ultimately found rebirth in a cycle leading back to the cloud from which they came.
***
Sometime later, the green grass persisted in its lushness nourished by the raindrops and the sunshine that arrayed itself through the clouds. So happy was the green grass that it even grew up between the cracks of the driveway.
johnthebaptist15 