It rained this morning.I love breathing in deeply the fresh smell of rain.

I have to admit that in the tropics where i live, my favourite type of weather is a good hard, set in rain. I suspect that if I lived in the UK I might feel a little differently about this, but here it freshens and brings cool to an otherwise uncomfortable heat. Our house here in Jamaica is on a bushy hill that overlooks the city of Kingston. Quite often when I am down in the valley I can look up and see our house on the hill shrouded not just with rainclouds but with rainbows. When I am up in my house all I see and feel is the rainstorm, but when the light streams through the storms others far away see a rainbow.

The only kind of rain I am not as fond of are the thunderstorms with loud  thunder and flashing lightening. Hurricanes that rant and roar.

Life has its thunderstorms too. Sometimes it also has its hurricanes.

As 2015 draws to an end and 2016 begins I breath a sigh of relief and find myself thankful that the last year has ended and hopeful that the next will be easier. Busyness and stress can wear you down, life can become a dull grey drizzle or a raging storm..sometimes a mix of both.

When I get fed up with life, with the stress of not enough money , not enough time, not enough… well just not enough, after my ranting raging bout of self pity,  I sometimes find myself able to get to a place where I can look up. I look up around me to others who are likewise struggling, but with even bigger challenges than I.

My friend Charmaine lives in the inner city. Her husband was unfaithful and left her years ago for someone else and she is now left raising her three children and her sister’s child (all now adolescents) alone on a very slim budget in a community that is often violent and always rough. Instead of complaining Charmaine gets up every morning and goes to work at the basic school with her 2-3 year old students and then twice a week runs kids clubs after school for other children in her community. She gives in a thankless world. And though life is hard she is always singing, even when she works she has a song in her heart and on her lips.

Light is simply light, but it takes a storm to make a rainbow.

Seeing Charmaine’s response to her difficulties is for me like seeing the light breaking through a thunderstorm.  She probably cannot see it herself as she is on the inside of herself, close to all her storms. But the light in her which causes her to love and serve the children around her and to sing in the midst of her storms is broken by the raindrops of her storms into particles of coloured light. All is light and all is colour and all is a rainbow. And as I stare in awe at this rainbow it helps break me out of my own thunderstorm and find the light inside of myself that causes me to sing. And maybe if I sing long enough through the storm someone farther off will look at me and see a rainbow that stirs in them a song.