We were walking home from the train station, my grandfather and I, after visiting my grandmother in hospital. Home was a mile away, and there were no buses. It was night, and it had begun to rain.
This was no gentle, English rain such as we had been used to before emigrating to Australia. This was a Sydney downpour, of the kind celebrated by Dorothea Mackellar, the Australian poet, in her poem, "My Country" :
"I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains"
Our umbrellas and raincoats afforded no protection. Not only were we soon literally soaked to the skin, but the pockets of the plastic raincoat I was wearing filled up with water! It quickly became apparent that nothing we could do would make any difference to our sodden state, so we simply accepted the situation, and laughed our way home.
A pocketful of rain made me realise that things couldn’t get any worse. I was wet, no matter how hard I’d tried to keep dry.
Sometimes it’s difficult to accept that we’re not able to be in control in all life’s situations but, once we’ve cottoned on to that fact, we’re ready for the next step – the realisatiion that we don’t have to be in control. It isn’t up to us to solve all the world’s problems.
Finally, we come to the position of being able to "let go, and let God". We can safely trust our lives, now and in the future, to Him .
Zillah Williams
262 words
September 2004
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