A miracle happened in California this week. It began to rain. It continued off and on for several days. In fact rain is still falling as I write this. We didn’t care that some days there was only drizzle, or the moisture-laden clouds stalled at the Berkeley Hills, leaving just the smell of rain in the air. The aromas of a renewed, rehydrated earth caused much rejoicing. Folks in the northeast, drowned in precipitation in all its forms, including frozen icy ones, probably think we’re daft. But for Californians who watched reservoirs drop to the bottom, and saw the rise of old drowned ghost towns lost for years, and redwood tree stumps suddenly emerging like apparitions from an ancient past, we experienced a real fear of running out of water.

   Do you ever sing while you walk in the park in the rain? I’m like Gene Kelly, “Singing in the Rain,” except I’m not as good a dancer. On a walk between the raindrops this week, nourished spiritually while Urantia received heaven’s blessing, the words of a song that I’ve known for decades (actually much older, written in 1912) came back to me. It was “In the Garden,” and for the first time, the meaning of the words truly came alive for me. The lyric described the experience I was having here in 2014, over a century since it was written. I too had a very strong sense that he “walks with me, and he talks with me, and tells me I am his own.”