Even Then

My love and I have a romantic thing planned, today.  It is a rainy day, which will make it more challenging than it could be otherwise.  I have a different understanding of how that would be interpreted than I once might have had. 

There was a time that I was in charismatic/ pentecostal churches for many years.  The risk in some of those churches or in other prosperous circles is to feel that you should judge the "good" of a thing by how little resistance or difficulty that one has.  Someone that has more money is therefore "blessed," and someone that struggles more is therefore not on the path they should be walking or does not have the favor of God, ignoring that scripture is almost completely stories of God's favor being on or enacted in struggle.

I have posted a lot about the wonderful and amazing love and blessing of my relationship with my fiancee, and it has been such a gift of God that it has not felt real, at times.  However, it didn't happen in a vacume of challenges.  There have been clouds all along the way, and some things happened that didn't feel like blessings.  But, the good happened with them.  The light happened in the darkness.  I used to say a good definition of faith is expectation plus determination.  It's believing in SPITE of the challenge.  That's how you know something or someone is true, actually... if it remains when it's not rosy.  

I know my love and I are true and our hearts full of love and joy, rain or shine.  So, I can't expect a better sign of God for our romance than for it to happen in spite of the rain.  And, I will happily dance in the rain with her, literal or metaphorical, in all our life.