Nature's resiliency in the face of drought is astonishing.

Fields, lawns and pastures can look like wintered ghosts for weeks on end, only to resurrect their greenness nearly overnight when sufficient rainfall returns.

We've all been witnesses of that miracle again following our Sahara summer of 100-plus degrees and no rain that has transformed into an autumn more recovered than we ever might have anticipated.

Streams that lost all of their water, and looked like sunken trails through the woods, gurgle merrily, and the foliage is predicted to be in Technicolor supreme this month.

That drought, clearly, is in our rear-view mirror right now.

But other droughts remain.

Both large and small.

Down that street.

Up that road.

Along that hallway.

At the end of that aisle.

People here and people there trying to recover from the droughts in their own lives. Droughts that have nothing to do with the weather that fills the sky.

Droughts that have everything to do with the weather that fills our heads, the weather gathering in our hearts.

All of us have our sunny days, but we can cloud over, storming occasionally. That's human. We are not immune to our own humanity.

As does the weather that shines or falls from the sky, our own personal “weather” impacts those around us, our families, our colleagues.

When someone flashes you a wide and genuine smile, it is impossible not to shine one back on your own face, isn't it? Infectious grins are just that. Conversely, if someone thunders at you then you can feel your own lightning ready to strike back.

None of us can control the weather around us. Yes, we can adjust the thermostat to make our interior climates warmer or cooler, depending upon our needs, but only in a room, house or office space.

But the real weather outside?

Not a thing we can do but raise an umbrella and keep on walking. And after months of drought, that can be the best weather of all-simple rain.

The weather inside us, on the other hand, is another matter.

We don't have to storm.

No need to thunder like that.

And why the lightning at all?

Then there are those who hold on to their rain, keeping it deep down inside them at the bottom of some endless well where only they can reach. Even when they see others around them suffering from drought they keep their rain to themselves, for themselves.

When we take our own weather to the extreme, we can have a drought effect on the people around us. Nothing new can grow. What once was growing shrivels, dries up, and is blown away. There is no harvest. No breaking bread together because our drought has broken the only means to such communion.

Only our rain, then, can bring resurrection. If we have the strength to let go of it and let it fall on those we have parched.

And you know what? When we bring rain to someone's drought their powers of recovery can be every bit as stunning as the world reminded us when drought warnings gave way to green mornings of glistening dew.

So let a raindrop fall.

Then another and another.

Start a shower.

Be the rain.

Fall, as if from the heavens, onto someone else's thirsty ground.

Your own earth, as well as theirs, will grow better for it.

-JKW-