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Imagine, if you will, a January morning in coastal China, 1920s. The air is crisp, clear. The kind of crystalline winter day that feels like the sky has been polished overnight. Fishermen prepare their nets. Merchants arrange their wares. And in a village that has stood for centuries, priests make ready for a festival that has never, in three hundred years, seen rain.
This is not a detail to be overlooked.
Three hundred years of perfect weather. Three hundred years of clear skies on the day dedicated to Tai Wang, the village deity. Three hundred festivals without a single drop of rain. It was more than coincidence; it was proof. Proof that their god was listening. Proof that their god was real.
Enter Watchman Nee.
If you've heard his name at all, you likely know him for his theological writings, for books like The Normal Christian Life and Sit, Walk, Stand that still circulate in seminaries and church libraries. Perhaps you know of his imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution, where he would spend the final twenty years of his life. But what you may not know is the story of how, on a clear January day, the heavens themselves seemed to bend to prove a point.
Nee hadn't planned to be there. Born to a Methodist family, educated in Western schools, he was a reluctant evangelist, carrying the weight of a promise his mother had made before his birth—to dedicate him to God's service. He was intellectual, reserved. Not the type to challenge an entire village's three-century tradition.
But then came the convert.
History hasn't preserved his name, this young man whose zeal exceeded his wisdom. All we know is that he was new to the faith, burning with the passion of the recently convinced, when he issued a challenge to the village elders: If Jesus was the true God, it would rain on the day of Tai Wang's festival.
The priests must have laughed. Three hundred years of perfect weather stood behind them.
When Watchman Nee heard about the wager, he was horrified. This wasn't evangelism; this was spiritual Russian roulette. But as the festival approached, something stirred within him. A question, ancient and insistent: "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?"
It's a line from scripture, from the moment when Elisha, having witnessed his mentor Elijah taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire, stands before the Jordan River wondering if the same power that parted waters for his teacher would work for him. "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?" he asks, and strikes the water with Elijah's cloak.
The waters part.
January 11th dawned precisely as the priests expected—perfectly clear. The village bustled with activity. Offerings were prepared. Musicians tuned their instruments. The wooden figure of Tai Wang was polished and readied for its procession through the streets.
Watchman Nee prayed.
What goes through a man's mind in such moments? What thoughts race through the consciousness when everything—your reputation, your ministry, perhaps the spiritual fate of an entire village—hinges on something entirely beyond your control? We don't know exactly what words Nee used, what arguments he presented to heaven. We only know what happened next.
The clouds came first. Small, innocuous. The kind you might notice and then dismiss on any other day. But they grew. And darkened. And multiplied.
Then the rain.
Not a gentle mist. Not a passing shower. But a deluge. A torrent that transformed streets into rivers, that sent festival-goers scrambling for shelter, that caused the carefully prepared decorations to run their colors into puddles of bleeding ink.
And most dramatically, most unignorably, the rain that caused the priests to lose their grip on Tai Wang himself. The idol—centuries old, revered, feared—crashed to the ground. Its head broke off. An arm shattered.
Divine intervention, or a particularly well-timed weather pattern? The question hangs in the air, even now.
But the story doesn't end there. In a move that might strike some as cunningly pragmatic, the priests quickly announced that they had miscalculated. The actual festival date was January 14th, not the 11th. A simple calendrical error, nothing more.
Watchman Nee, perhaps surprising even himself, accepted the challenge anew. He prayed for clear skies until the 14th. For three days, under cloudless heavens, he preached to a village suddenly willing to listen. People converted. A small church formed.
And then, with a precision that stretches coincidence to its breaking point, at 6:00 PM on January 14th—the rescheduled festival time—the rains returned.
There's something in this story that transcends its historical particulars, that speaks to something deeper about the human experience of faith and doubt. About the moments when the invisible seems to break through into the visible world. About what happens when our carefully constructed certainties—whether religious or secular—are suddenly and dramatically challenged.
Watchman Nee would go on to establish churches throughout China before the Communist revolution led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1952. He would spend the remaining twenty years of his life in a labor camp, his writings smuggled out by family members, his influence spreading far beyond the prison walls that contained him.
But perhaps, in quiet moments during those long years of confinement, his mind would drift back to that January day when the skies opened, when an ancient village tradition was interrupted, when the question—"Where is the Lord God of Elijah?"—received its answer in the falling rain.
In our age of algorithms and explanations, of weather forecasts accurate to the minute and the fraction of a degree, it's easy to dismiss such stories. To find rational explanations. To file them away as coincidence or exaggeration or myth.
But there's another possibility, isn't there? That sometimes, the veil between worlds thins. That sometimes, the God of Elijah still answers by fire—or by rain.
What would it mean to live as if that were true?
This exploration of faith, challenge, and divine response continues in our latest podcast episode. Available now on all platforms.
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