Think Like a Raindrop

Author: Marvin Lindsay
July 17, 2023

Our 2023 Mission Trip participants stayed at an elementary school in Shady Valley, Tennessee. On one wall of the school, I saw a sign: Think like a raindrop. “What does that mean?” I wondered. I googled the saying and discovered a sermon by anEpiscopal priest named Bernard Owens who had gone on a mission trip with Appalachia Service Project, the same group with which we were working. In his sermon he explained that ASP’s calling is to make homes warmer, safer, and dryer. To make a home dryer, you have to think like a raindrop. Raindrops want to go down to the lowest level possible as fast and efficiently as possible. A lot of ASP work is about persuading rain drops to go the long way around—down a roof, into a gutter, down the downspout, and away from the foundation—rather than going through the living room, or kitchen, or bedroom.

But Fr. Owens then went in a different direction. He quoted a short passage from the Dao de Jing, an important work of Chinese philosophy:

The supreme good is like water,
Which nourishes all things without effort.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.

God is the supreme good, and God, like water, is constantly seeking out the low places. God came to us in Jesus Christ and went to the lowest place imaginable, the cross, out of love for humanity.
I believe our group was borne along by that love to Shady Valley, Tennessee. Now Shady Valley is almost 3,000 feet higher in altitude than Haddonfield. It’s now a low place in terms of geography. But it’s average income and educational levels are lower than the national average, and it lies in Appalachia, a part of the country that is held in low esteem when compared to other locations. Rehabbing homes in and around Shady Valley was hard work, but many of us found a contentment there in that “low place” that God’s love tends to flow toward.

You don’t have to make a nine-hour car drive to experience this. Simply open yourself to the flow of God’s love, and not only will you find contentment, you’ll acquire some “friends in low places,” to quote a famous country music song. And who doesn’t need a friend or two more?

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