It’s been raining here.
-JD
A lot.
Not the soft, wistful kind of rain that makes you want to stare out a window with a cup of tea and listen to Sigur Ros. We’ve had that too, but this has been the relentless kind. The kind of rain that soaks through boots and schedules and small talk. The kind that doesn’t ask permission before it starts washing things away.
And yet… I’ve been paying close attention.
Because something in me has started to wonder if the rain knows what it’s doing.
I’ve been learning about soil. About herbs and healing and the ancient ways—those old paths that understood the body as part of the Earth, the Earth as part of the divine, and healing as a return to harmony and flow, not just the absence of pain.
I’ve got garden beds waiting to be filled in the backyard. One will be for fruits and foods, the other for herbs and medicines. I’m making my herbalism dreams a reality. An aloe on the windowsill that was thriving until the repotting and still might make it, if grace holds. Grow bags lined up like little promises to my future self. And in the middle of it all, I’ve been watching how the rain seeps into everything—how it turns the compost, softens the crust, reminds the seeds they’re not forgotten down there.
But this isn’t just a story about gardening.
This past week, our friends lost everything in their basement. Three feet of rainwater swallowed their world. We spent the weekend cutting drywall, lifting soaked furniture, tossing years of life into a dumpster while their kids watched from the stairs. There’s a particular kind of silence that fills a house after the flood. And there’s a strange kind of holiness in carrying waterlogged pieces of someone’s story, shoulder to shoulder, soaked to the bone, laughing when you can, crying when you need to.
I work with water for a living. Storm drains. Pipes. Septic tanks. Systems that most people only think about when they fail. I know firsthand what happens when the flow gets blocked. I know how dangerous it truly gets when what was meant to flow stagnates.
And I think that’s what this rain has been showing me.
So this is not a weather report.
This is a gospel.
A gospel written in raindrops.
A gospel for anyone who’s ever felt the ground beneath them has turned to mud.
A gospel for the overwhelmed, the uprooted, the ones learning to grow again.
Because the rain isn’t here to ruin us.
It’s here to bring life.
It’s here to return us.
To the soil.
To each other.
To something older and deeper and far more alive than the life we built on the surface.
Welcome to The Gospel of Rain.
Let it soak in.
We are made of these…things…
dirt… and water… and breath.
That’s not poetry. That’s Genesis. That’s biology.
Rain doesn’t just fall from the clouds. It gives. It baptizes the ordinary. It brings the hidden back to life. And if you truly pay attention you’ll start to notice: the Earth doesn’t just respond to rain. It remembers it in a beautiful way.
And maybe we do too.
We as people have forgotten the gospel of the ground. The good news written into roots. The sacred story woven by weeds and worms and wild herbs growing in the cracks. Somewhere along the way, we’ve traded the ancient truth for convenience, plastic packaging, and produce that doesn’t rot because it’s so stripped of life it doesn’t even know how to properly die.
But the gardens still sing the old song. And if we’re willing to slow down, become aware, and listen, it will teach us how to sing along again.
Jesus, Soil, and the Mystery of Seeds
Jesus didn’t build temples. He didn’t establish seminaries. He told stories about soil.
In Matthew 13, he says the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, small and overlooked but capable of becoming a tree that is a shelter for birds. He says some seeds fall on rocky ground, some on shallow soil, some among thorns, and some on good soil…and the difference isn’t in the seeds. It’s in the readiness of the Earth.
The soul, like the soil, must be open… soft enough to receive, nourished enough to sustain, deep enough to grow.
This wasn’t purely metaphor. It was sacred geometry. Divine agriculture. A cosmic parable encoded into every living thing: life comes through death, transformation takes time, and good fruit only comes through rootedness.
Jesus didn’t say believe these doctrines or memorize these creeds. He said:
“Consider the lilies…”
“Look at the birds…”
“The kingdom is like a seed…”
He was pointing at the Earth, not away from it.
Honor Your Father and Mother
There’s an old commandment, one many of us learned in childhood:
Honor your father and your mother.
It’s usually read as a family ethic. But I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t so much more.
What if the Father is referring to our Divine Source, the heavenly blueprint in the stars, the radiant Spirit that animates all things…
And the Mother is the Earth, the womb of form, the soil of becoming, the very dust from which we were made?
In Hebrew, the word for “earth” is adamah—the root of the name Adam. In the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, Adam represents not just a man, but humanity as a whole—the cosmic being, both formed from the dust and filled with divine breath.
To honor the Father and the Mother, then, would be to walk in alignment with where we come from—Spirit and Soil. Breath and Body. Mystery and Matter.
When we dishonor either; by spiritualizing everything and denying the body, or by commodifying the Earth and forgetting the sacred, we lose our way.
We lose our very selves.
Wisdom from the East
The Taoist tradition teaches us about living in harmony with the natural rhythms of life. The Tao is the Way—the Source from which all things emerge and to which all things return. It flows like water, nourishes like rain, moves like wind through trees and time.
“The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.” – Lao Tzu
In gardening, this wisdom becomes real. You can’t force a plant to grow. You prepare the soil, tend the space, and then you must trust the seed to know what to do. This is the heart of both mystical faith and herbal practice: alignment and harmony, not control.
In Hinduism, the idea of dharma reflects your truest path—your alignment with nature, spirit, and self. There’s a beautiful teaching that all beings have their own dharma, even a leaf or a river. To live your dharma is to live like a tree: rooted, patient, in service to the whole.
Herbalism becomes dharma when we begin to see each plant as a bearer of wisdom, each root as a teacher. We don’t just utilize them—we commune with them and we learn from them.
Soil as Scripture, Rain as Revelation
We were made from the dust. That’s not a demotion. Honestly, it’s a deep honor. The same elements that form stars form your cells. The same carbon in a fallen tree lives on in your bones. The Earth isn’t beneath us. She is of us.
The Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1).
And the Earth?
She doesn’t just absorb the rain
She listens. She remembers. She responds.
Rain isn’t just water falling from the sky.
It’s the memory of the heavens returning to the soil.
It’s the baptism that makes resurrection possible.
Soil isn’t just dirt.
It’s alive. Teeming. Holy.
A thin place where death becomes nourishment.
And the herbs we plant?
They’re not just medicine.
They’re messengers.
Whispers from the old world,
carrying healing that’s older than any of the systems we’ve created.
The Garden is Calling Us Back
We live in a time when disconnection is profitable.
But reconnection is powerful.
Revolutionary.
Healing.
When you grow your own food, you remember that abundance isn’t just an idea, it’s a practice.
When you tend to your herbs, you remember that healing is not always instant.
It’s relational.
When you let the rain baptize your garden, you remember that nothing living thrives without receiving.
This is the gospel of the garden.
The truth that’s been growing since the beginning.
Eden is not lost, it’s waiting for us to honor our Father and our Mother.
Since you’re still here, I wanna know:
What are you growing this season in the soil?
In your body?
In your spirit?
What rhythms are you aligning with that the world told you to ignore?
What would it look like to honor both your Father in heaven and your Mother beneath your feet?