There is a particular kind of confidence that comes over me when I leave the house without an umbrella. It is not bravery. It is not faith, exactly. It is something closer to willful amnesia — a cheerful refusal to remember every single other time I made this same decision and ended up wringing out my shirt in a church vestibule.
North Carolina weather does not reward this kind of optimism. It never has. The sky here operates on its own schedule, unimpressed by my plans.
I own at least four umbrellas. I know this because I have counted them during moments of dry, comfortable self-reflection. There is one in the coat closet, one somewhere in the car — probably under the seat — one that I borrowed from someone years ago and have quietly adopted, and one that appeared in the lost-and-found at church and somehow followed me home.
Four umbrellas. A man surrounded by umbrellas on all sides.
And yet.
I have developed theories about why I keep leaving them behind. The most flattering theory is that I am a person who lives in the present moment, unburdened by anxious contingency planning. A kind of accidental mindfulness. This theory falls apart almost immediately, since I will spend twenty minutes hunting for my keys before I leave but not once glance at the sky.
The more honest theory is that I look out the window, see no immediate rain, and simply decide that the rest of the day will resemble that one window at that one moment. This is less mindfulness and more a failure of imagination.
My wife checks the weather app. She always has an umbrella. She has tried to share both of these habits with me for many years. I admire her persistence.
I do not have a tidy lesson here. I am not going to claim that God is teaching me something through wet socks. Maybe He is, but I suspect He has more interesting projects.
What I can say is this: there is something quietly human about knowing better and still walking out the door into whatever sky decides to happen. We are all, in our own ways, leaving the umbrella behind.
Some of us just do it more literally than others.