I heard this from the writer Rhydian Brook on Radio 4 last week :
"I've prayed about the weather a few times in life; but I've never felt that comfortable about it. Partly because my requests usually concern holidays, weddings, or barbeques as opposed to having to ask for rain to fall on crops so my family can eat. Praying for the weather is fraught with uncomfortable theological questions. If one man prays for sun on his holiday and another prays for rain for his crops which one does God listen to? If you pray and the weather changes is it because you deserve it? Why does it, as the Bible says, 'rain on the just and the unjust?' Is God involved in the weather anyway? I had this thought as I re-watched the wonderful French film Jean de Florette in which the desperate hero prays for rain only to see the clouds rumble tantalisingly over his crops before moving on to fall on other fields. He then rants at God's injustice and questions whether He's there at all.
These days we blame weathermen for poor forecasts or ourselves for changes in the climate where once God was held responsible for all things meteorological: He was in the storm that sunk the ship, behind the lightning that struck the tree, he was the wind that blew where he wanted. The weather was, like God, hard to predict and only certain people - Elijah ordering a drought in response to the King's corruption; or Jesus calming the storm - could get it to do anything. And yet people saw in the weather signs of God's judgement and blessing and believed there was a moral correlation between the weather and their actions.
In our efforts to understand how our actions effect the climate maybe we're closer to this biblical idea of weather as moral barometer than we realise. One half of the world burns fuel to escape from bad weather; while the other half escapes bad weather caused by people burning fuel but we can't escape the consequences. Maybe I need to stop praying for changes in the weather that make my day better and start praying for changes in the climate that make other lives better. It's not about weather that's good; it's about weather that's right. "
