If It Rains

by Jennifer L. Wright

When you all come back. Somehow she still had it—that irrational faith. I believed in God, sure. But He was distant, judgmental, maybe even just a little bit mean. I didn’t understand Melissa’s God. To her, He was Someone bigger, Someone there in the room with us, Someone not contained in words on a page or the walls of a church, awesome and powerful and loving. Someone in whom she had enough faith to say words like when you all come back.

“Because even against all that blackness, they’re there. The darkness doesn’t scare ’em. In fact, you notice ’em precisely because of the dark. Because they keep going. In a dark, scary, noisy world, they shine out bright, quiet, and brave.”

A world in need of a faith like hers. A faith of sacrifice, of service, of loving others before self, no matter the cost. I remembered her prayers, every morning, every evening, short, quiet . . . and powerful. She never left those prayers sitting on her Bible; they went with her all through the day, draped over her like a shawl, opening her eyes to things others couldn’t see, giving her strength to charge forward when others shrank away.

Sometimes shining means staying. Other times it means going. But it never means to quit.”

so long I’d focused on what I’d lacked, what had been taken from me—my mother, my father, my sister, even my home—while God had been trying to show me what had always and would always remain: Him.

The reason my father hadn’t allowed me to have the surgery

wasn’t because he didn’t love me. It was because he did. Because Ma had loved me. Because he had just lost her and couldn’t lose me, too. And because, if I’d had it, everything would have been different. Pa would have been different. Melissa would

have been different. I would have been different. His choice had molded us, shaped us, defined us. If I’d had the surgery, who we were—and we...

This whole journey was not a punishment from a mean, spiteful, distant God, a way to emphasize my weakness. Rather, it was His way of showing me my strength. Because I’d had it all along—and it came from Him and who He’d made me to be.