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      It is raining, again. I look out my window on the cherry tree, with its limbs of newly erupted, delicate, baby-pink flowers, now challenged by the heavy rain, and I listen to Stitch, my talking cat, complain to me and to the world that his favorite toy is stuck deep beneath the dresser. I am here at my computer to write a blog entry for the first time in what feels like weeks, but all I seem able to do is stare at the rain.

     Saturday's justice project brought me some new friends. The clouds were threatening rain from the time we woke up, and the rains started soon after, but we went anyway, to the refugee neighborhood our church has adopted. I met a Vietnamese woman whose name, I believe, was Yen. I gave her an apple and used a lot of gestures, explaining about the medical tent and the free food we were offering. She smiled graciously at me and continued to say, "No English," but I know she understood the apple. She cupped it in both hands and held it close to her chest, like the kind of gift you can't expect every day. And I saw her later in line at the medical tent. We caught each other's eyes and she smiled at me.
     Jake and some of the other men started up a soccer match with a gang of the young neighborhood boys. There was a lot of screaming and slipping in the mud. I felt as though I were back in Brazil, where soccer is everything, and tiny brown-skinned boys of six year's age can be evenly matched against grown American men. You might've thought those young ones were fighting for their freedom out there in that mud pit of a field, the way the driving rain seemed to drive out of them the most fearless battle cries.
     While the boys played war with the soccer ball, Daisy and I walked around, picking up trash before it could float away in the streams of run-off rain. At one point, we came upon a pretty little Vietnamese girl, sitting on a curb. She was wearing muddy flip-flops, letting the running current of rain water wash over her feet, making her sandals pink again. I thought how frozen her tiny, bare toes must be - the rain was bone-chilling cold this Saturday - but she was all happiness, captivated with blowing bubbles and watching them pop in the rain.
     I don't exactly know why I'm writing any of this. I guess I felt like I should post something. And I figure if I simply let my fingers type away, something good is bound to come out eventually, right? It can be so difficult to write sometimes - I'm always a little afraid that I have nothing particularly interesting to say. But I'm learning that the important thing is to keep at it anyway.
     Jake does such a wonderful job of this. Freelance illustration work keeps knocking him around again and again. We sometimes wonder whether we'll make the rent, but he doesn't give in to the fear. He trusts that if he is faithful with his talent, the money will show up. And it always has.
     I think, if we are honest, there is something like this for each of us - something that, if we were smart, we would grit our teeth and stick with, and refuse to let present circumstances control our dreams, or our joy. We would learn to blow bubbles in the middle of the downpour and let the run-off water clean our feet.
     I once heard Erwin McManus say that you shouldn't run away from your fear - the only thing to do is run straight toward it.

 Charge!

(The above illustration is one of Jake's. It's still a work in progress.)