It is raining in northeast Indiana as I write. But it wasn’t raining earlier this morning. When I hauled myself out of bed, I looked out the window. Dark clouds. I wondered if it might rain, so I checked one and then the other weather app on my phone. The first app told me not to worry; no drops would fall until around 9:00 a.m. – long after I’d come in from my morning run. The second app told a more foreboding story, however. The clouds were due to burst in exactly 29 minutes, about the time I’d have finished the morning psalms and was ready to hit the pavement. Both apps agreed that the temperature outside was in the mid-40s and that it really felt as if it was in the 30’s. A possibility or rain, chillier than I expected. Maybe a morning to stay in a warm, dry house. Perhaps that was how best to understand the first morning psalm, “Let me take refuge under the shelter of your wings!” (Psalm 61:4).

Still no rain by the time I came to the closing line of Psalm 62, “You will render to all according to their work.”  App #1 was sticking to its 9:00 a.m. rain prediction and #2 had changed its mind. I still had 45 minutes until it got wet outside. 45 minutes was not long enough for my planned running route, but the loopy nature of our neighborhood (the streets if not always the neighbors) meant that I would be able to find a fairly fast path home should the rain begin to soak to my bones. Besides, what might I be rendered if I neglected the work of a morning run? Out I went.

The rain began around 9:00 a.m. – long after I’d come in from my morning run.

Sometimes weather app #1 is more reliable and sometimes it’s better to trust weather app #2. But no telling when.

Glitzy graphics and sophisticated algorithms don’t seem to have made weather forecasting much more reliable than it’s ever been. That’s kind of the nature of most forecasting, however. The population bomb was a dud, Al Gore’s polar bears are thriving, the aliens from Area 51 have not taken charge of the planet, and, yes, Jesus has yet not come back.

Scientists, politicians, and preachers do well to avoid the traps of prognostication. The weather forecaster’s odds of 50% are about as good as we’re going to get.

So, do we say nothing about what we might expect? Do we allow uncertainty to send us unprepared into a wet and chilly world? Do we refuse to work to protect the planet, insist on justice, or guard life from beginning to end? Is our best engagement with an unpredictable world found in throwing up our hands, shaking our heads, and surrendering to what will be, whatever it may be? No.

Regardless of the weather forecast, the cultural conditions notwithstanding, no matter how dire the diagnosis, still we do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. We do so not because the odds are in our favor or because of the promise of high returns. We do so because God has shown us what is right and what he requires of us.

If weather app #1 and weather app #2 agree that a hard rain’s a-gonna fall, I am wise to forgo my morning run. Never does wisdom, never does God, call me to forgo the still more excellent way of love.