Daily Breakfast 675 – The Power of Three
Survival camp in Luxembourg; The power of prayer; Looking forward to Australia and New Zealand; Three great new additions to the SQPN Family: Among Women, In Between Sundays and the Catholic Foodie!
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About prayer for good weather: be careful what you ask for … Do you remember the summer of 2006? In July it was extremely dry and hot over here (if I recall well, it had never been so dry in July in over a century). Not one drop of rain fell, and nature and agriculture were suffering heavily. Even the nettles in the forest were completely dying, and they never do that! A cartoon in a Dutch paper showed a car on a desert road and a sign ‘beach 50 km’. Really, the country started to look like that!
The weather forecast in the beginning of August told that there would be one day with some rain, and then mostly dry weather again. We had weekly Adoration at that time in the Holy Spirit church in Amersfoort. We prayed for rain on the evening of that – still dry – day, as the clouds started to get thicker. It started raining during the silent prayer time and I begged God for it to increase. That happened almost immediately. I’m sure that more people were praying for the same thing. By the end of the Adoration, it was pouring. It was very difficult to hear your prayer due to the sound of rain falling on the roof of the church!
The funny thing was: it just did not stop! Everyone waited inside, because even going to one’s car on the parking place 10 meters from the church entrance would be enough to get completely soaked. Some of the parishioners made coffee and tea and later on I heard that you stayed for almost an hour more and then went home, while still the rain was pooring down (just for the record of people elsewhere: in our climate it’s rather normal in summer to have thunderstorms with pooring rain for 10 minutes or so, but never for hours at a row ánd especially not without any lightning and thunder). I myself decided to bike home almost immediately after Adoration, not caring about getting wet. I was so happy, singing and yelling halleluja on the street! The streets were filled with water, like I only had seen a few times before in an entire lifetime (and never without a thunderstorm). At one instance I was biking through at least 30 cm of water, while there are no hills at all in that part of town. The sewers just couldn’t deal with it. At home I poured the water from my shoes into the sink!
The weather forecast was wrong. It wouldn’t stop raining for one month at a row! OK, of course it did stop at times, but August was 3 times as wet as usual. For agriculture it was even too much; especially the potato fields couldn’t cope with it. I remember that I said to God “OK, please, now it’s enough, could You make it stop, pleasssseeee?”
But that didn’t happen so suddenly as the start of it.
Of course I know there is really nothing scientific about this. Neither about your story. And also, loads of people ask God for different weather types and it doesn’t happen. All of this could be a coincidence. But still I found it extraordinary, and not something I’ll forget easily. I’m curious to hear if you recall this particular Adoration too (if so, I wasn’t the only one who found it spectacular).