When the Rain Finally Came toEli Creek

In the summer of 2012, the farmers around Eli Creek, Missouri, watched their soybean fields crack and curl under the worst drought in fifty years. Wells ran dry. Cattle were sold early. The old-timers said they had never seen the creek bed bare down to the stones. Pastor Gene Wharton at Eli Creek Baptist recalled how the whole town felt it — not just in the fields, but in themselves. Neighbors who had feuded for years over fence lines and water rights sat together at the diner, too tired to argue. Something about shared suffering loosened old grudges.

Then in September, the rain came. Not a violent storm, but a slow, steady soaking that lasted three days. Gene said he stood on his porch and watched the water pool in the dust, and he wept. Not just for the crops, but because he saw something he could only describe as mercy meeting the ground.

That is exactly the portrait the psalmist paints in Psalm 85 — a land restored, where "love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other" (v. 10). The psalm speaks of a people who had endured God's displeasure, who waited through a long spiritual drought. And then the Lord turned toward them again. The ground that had been hard and barren began to yield. Faithfulness sprang up from the earth, and righteousness looked down from heaven.

Sometimes restoration begins not with a downpour, but with a slow, steady rain on cracked ground.