Sunscreen and Umbrellas

“For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

I live in Aurora, Colorado. On most days in our city, the sun shines. In fact, it doesn’t just shine, it envelopes us. We love it.

That also means that on good old-fashioned rainy days, we celebrate. The rain becomes a celebrity, just for showing up.

Matthew 5:45 reminds me that the sun and rain are “His.”  They belong to God. I claim no ownership and wield no control over either.

As such, it’s up to God who basks in the warmth of His sun, and what land is graced by His rain. The beams and the drops are His to navigate, delegate and deploy.

Have you noticed that people who defame the name of God, and farmers who curse at the thought of Jesus still are warmed by His light and profitable by His rain?

Does it shock you to see gardens grow for the Godless?

And what of those arrogant atheists who throw the sails of their yachts into the air, recline in the sunshine on the deck, and who revel in their cunning schemes to exploit the poor?

Wouldn’t it be easier to entice people to follow Jesus if the Godless lived in perpetual darkness? Wouldn’t our efforts to evangelize be enhanced significantly if it were only our yards that were green?

Manipulation was never God’s plan for winning converts. In fact, His words about sunshine and rain sit in the center of His command to love our enemies.

God wraps gifts for under the Christmas tree, and not just for His family and friends. He gives good gifts to people who hate Him, ignore Him, and malign Him.

The light of the sun may illuminate the path to evil for some… but God still gives it. The rain may be used to water philosophies of life that repudiate the presence of a Supreme Being, but open your umbrellas, the rain still falls.

God’s generous love splashed enough light for Mother Theresa to find her way to the poor and sick; but it also rises each morning for the new wave of atheists who use its light to write their latest defiant treatise.

Love. Inextinguishable love.

Revealed in God. Revealed by God. Unleashed on us. Unleashed in us.

… but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

We love because He first loved us.

The implications are significant. This means that it’s not just Christians who buy sunscreen and umbrellas…

But, there’s a flip side to this coin; a harsh reality that equally lives in the light of His love.

Followers and lovers of Jesus get chemotherapy, and have car accidents, and heart attacks, and are in the wrong place when a terrorist bomb detonates.

The outrageous love of God doesn’t entitle us, and it doesn’t make us immune.

There are Godly people under hospice care… not because loving Jesus doesn’t matter, but because it does. His light shines. In us. Through us. In the congregation of care, and on the front lines of the enemy.

Sun and rain. Terminal illnesses and terrorism.

The light shines. Love lives.

Buy a bottle of SPF50 and an umbrella for your closest skeptic. And bless and commission your precious Christ-following cancer patient.

Sunshine on the Godless. Hope in the face of evil.

Love your enemies. Love like Jesus.