it's starting to rain

Sometimes you don't even realize it's happening. You're busy, on the phone, on the run, and all of a sudden you look up and see. It's starting to rain.

So, yeah, right now we're busy. Christmas and our Dominican trip are coming at us fast. There are all these projects and lists and expectations. Things that are pressing in, things that can numb us to the miracle of the season.

Take heart and see. Miracles are happening right now: It's starting to rain.

There's a growing pile of gifts for our Wish List--in a box outside a classroom at Rockford Christian, in the waiting room of a workplace on the south side of town, in your own basements. Gifts that will make wishes come true for Rinaldo, Julia, Lurdes, and many more.

There are old duffle bags that could have been discarded but were donated instead. Duffle bags that will become the unlikely arks that will carry Wish-List gifts across a country and an ocean to a small hospital in San Cristóbal.

There are hundreds of white paper lunch bags that are being transformed into little lambs (by helpful Christmas elves!), so that the children who will sit on the tile floor of a classroom at Mission Emanuel or in the dirt of a street in Quita Sueño can hear about how much God loves them and how He comes for them like that lost lamb.

There are all of the checks--payments and donations that came from plenty and from want--checks that are making a way for us ordinary people to be the hands and feet of Jesus on a small island in the Caribbean.

There is an account that is quietly growing with donations from generous hearts, money that will miraculously become cement and cinderblocks and paint, so that families in Cielo can live in homes with solid walls and soft beds and toilets that flush. Money that will build walls so that the Evangelical Church of Cielo will one day have its very own building, standing at the crossroads between the villages of Cielo and Nazaret.

And there is all of you who have said yes to flying across an ocean. To flying away from social networks and comfort zones, and maybe Yes to flying free from some fears and insecurities and hangups. There is all of us together, learning to love like the rain falls--without reservation or discrimination, soaking dry ground and filling empty places.

And there is God. Loving us and making a thousand things happen that we can see, and a thousand more that we can't see. Miracles happening right now. It's raining at Christmastime.