Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Good in Rain

I recently went on a long road trip to visit a friend and it was gray and rainy the whole weekend. I had a great rental car with a sunroof! But no sun to be found! My first leg of the trip coming back was done at night, in pouring rain, which made the driving stressful, to say the least. There were times when the rain was so hard you couldn't see the lines in the road to tell which lane you were in. And sometimes there would be flashes of lightening that would blind me for a second or two. Very scary and tense! When I finally made it to my hotel room, I just about collapsed into the bed from exhaustion and went straight to sleep.

The next morning I was awakened by what sounded like rain! I got up and looked out the window and, sure enough, it was STILL gray and rainy, though not as bad as the night before. I closed the curtains and laid back down on the bed and almost cried at the thought of more driving in rain.  I was not in a very good frame of mind! I called my friend, who I had just visited and lamented about how tense the driving was the night before and now here I was having to do even more of it. But I knew I had to do it, so I showered and packed my stuff up and headed out for the road again.

For the first half hour or so, I had an attitude. Here I was with this great rental car with a sunroof and can't see any sun! I had six hours of driving in this crap! And I didn't even really want to be going back home. I had enjoyed my time with my friend and was kind of wishing I could just stay there with him. But before long, I started seeing a different picture.

As I began to descend from the mountains, the clouds broke and the rain stopped. There was a mist hovering above the mountain tops and the wet rocks glistened beautifully in the sunlight that was peeping through the clouds. The heavy rains had created majestic waterfalls coming down the side of the mountains. It was quite surreal, very much like the scenes you see in movies where a person has gone to heaven.

My grouchy attitude was replaced with a feeling of peace and serenity and my perspective changed. I was able to see a different picture. And even though the rain started again and I never did get to open that sunroof, the rest of the trip back was quite nice. Instead of complaining about what was bad about the trip, I decided to think about all the wonderfulness of it. And I realized that driving in heavy rain was the ONLY thing about the trip that was not wonderful! But I'm now glad that I had that one "bad" aspect of my trip because it helped me to practice looking for the good in the trip! And I thought of good things that I might not have thought about if the "bad" thing had not forced me to deliberately look for something good. And THAT is a good thing!!!!  Keep looking for the good!!!! :D