The pounding rain from the storm brought me warmth, light and love

By David McElroy · February 5, 2020

I stretched out my arms, as though I was welcoming the raindrops which were pounding on my body like tiny notes of a powerful symphony.

If anybody was watching, he might have thought I was crazy, but I didn’t care. I felt an exhilarating connection with Nature in that moment. I welcomed the rain. I welcomed the energy in the storm. And in that brief moment of touching God, I felt love and warmth and goodness.

I had eaten at a restaurant inside a store Wednesday evening. When it was time for me to leave, a driving rainstorm had started outside. There was hardly anybody left in the store. Everyone else seemed to have headed home in anticipation of the storm. As I walked slowly into the rain, I felt as though I was alone on Nature’s stage.

My heart swelled with warmth and love. Suddenly, without any intention or forethought, I was joyfully speaking words of love to someone who was not there to hear my words.

I felt like a joyful child as I made that long walk to my car. I didn’t hurry, because I didn’t want this moment to end. It felt special and holy, more like worship than most church services I’ve attended.

I felt as though something in my spirit transcended my body for that minute or two. I didn’t care that I was getting soaked. I felt as though my spirit stretched out to become something monumentally huge — stretching miles to merge with this powerful storm — and for just a moment, I knew once again what it felt like to know the majesty of God.

This wasn’t a rational thought. It wasn’t just an emotion. It was purely an experience of knowing that I was connected to something far bigger than myself.

And in the ecstasy of this experience, I kept returning to an expression of love. I have no idea why. I just needed to express in words something which was overflowing like waves and waves of liquid love pouring out of my soul.

I experienced it as warmth and light and colors. It was abstract, but the colors were full of intense blue and golden light and a pale pink, along with hints of crimson in the accents. I felt the colors and the light — and they were alive. If I had been able to hold onto this powerful experience for long enough, there was someone who would have emerged in the flesh.

In that moment, I knew without any question that love comes from somewhere other than my wants or needs or hopes or lusts or any such thing. Real love comes from somewhere else — if it comes at all — and we ignore that love at our spirit’s peril.

Love is not our choice.

I can’t fully explain what I experienced. I made some photos once I got to the car to try to capture the spirit of what had happened, but I couldn’t find an image powerful enough. I’ve included a couple of those here.

All I know is that I had a beautiful and powerful experience of God. I have no idea why. I didn’t see it coming. I couldn’t recreate it if I tried.

He was in the wind and the rain and the light and the colors.

And even the briefest of brushes with this all-powerful Creator leaves no doubt where genuine love always comes from.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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