Fire and Rain – The Sun-Gazette Newspaper | CPT PPP Coverage

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One night two weeks ago—maybe some of you remember—there was a hot wind blowing from the east after dark, very unusual. It carried the scent of tarweed, which I love. It drew me outside, I couldn’t get enough of it. And because I was outside at this unusual hour, under these unusual conditions, I noticed a tree branch whipping too close for comfort to where Edison’s power lines enter my house. In my mind I could see sparks flying, or rain-wet branches conducting electricity where it doesn’t belong. It was a gift, and the next morning I found the chutzpah to cut that limb from the tree. That one act of self-reliance led to several others, and by the time the rain came I had most things I cared about under cover, tasks I normally would have despaired of doing.

Woody Guthrie wrote a song called “Sowin’ On The Mountain” that I used to sing with Jesse McCuin as the duo called Candlepower. It’s a hair prophetic: “Sowin; on the mountain, reaping in the valley—you’re gonna reap what you have sown,” is the chorus. One of the verses is especially biblical: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ Won’t be water, but fire next time.” We loved singing that song, both of us just a little Jeremiah-like. But I wondered even then if humanity might succumb to both fire and rain.

I hadn’t connected the fire part to Jesus until the following Sunday, when the new pastor at Porterville’s First United Methodist Church preached on Luke 12:49, where Jesus says he came to bring fire to the earth. Pastor Juan is from the Philippines, where hurricanes, typhoons and all the consequences of wind and rain are common. But he preached Jesus’ society-splitting fire instead, and unpacked it so well no one could miss his meaning. The battle rages inside us, he said, and we must choose which part of our divided selves we will feed: our money-grubbing, status-seeking, power-mongering side, or our neighbor-conscious, Creator-spawned, life-loving side. That will make the difference, not between whether we burn or drown, but whether we live or die.

The import for this climate tipping-point can’t be overlooked.

Trudy Wischemann is a woman who loves watching the sky for forecasts. Send her your hopes for humanity’s future c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.