Can You Stand the Rain?
- R.E.A.C.H. Team
- Dec 24, 2025
- 4 min read
A few years ago I was going through a really dark time and I really didn’t feel worthy to be around anyone besides my family.
Thankfully I have a dear friend and soulmate who checked on me constantly. She was not a fan of my isolation at all. So when a mutual friend who owned a restaurant was celebrating his birthday after businesses started opening back up, she told me I had no choice but to go with her.
I went with her, and three of my favorite artists from Columbus happened to be performing that night. Now this was when we were still dealing with the pandemic and we had all been on lockdown for almost a year. This was the first time many of us had been out to enjoy live music together. When they started performing, we all went crazy! It was such a relief to finally be around people again. They sang R&B hits from the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and we were eating it up. I hadn’t felt that good in a long time, and I was thankful Nisha made me go.
After the last performance, our friend, the birthday boy, took the stage to close out the night. He thanked everyone for coming and told us he had had a heart attack that summer. The doctors said he only had a thirty percent chance of living, so this birthday was truly something special to him. Then he invited one of the singers, Quan Howell, back to the stage to close the show.
Quan started performing an R&B remix of the theme song from Cheers, the one that says, “Where everybody knows your name.” He was blowing the walls off the place. Then he had us all join in. It turned into a big sing-along with about a hundred people smiling, singing, and soaking in the moment. It was a whole vibe. Then Quan transitioned into New Edition’s Can You Stand the Rain. He kept us singing along, leading us like a choir, and everyone was loving it. Then he started repeating the refrain, “Can you stand the rain”, over and over again. In between the lines, he started speaking. Or maybe it’s better to say he started ministering. After each refrain, he said something like, “Some of us have lost friends and family members this past year, but ask yourself”, and then he’d sing the refrain, “Can you stand the rain?” Again he’d minister and sing, “Some of us have gone through some of the darkest times of our lives, but Can you stand the rain? Some of us have had moments when we just wanted to give up, but Can you stand the rain?”
He kept building the energy higher and higher. I knew exactly what was happening. I understood the psychology behind it because I had seen it done in church before. I wouldn’t call it manipulative, but he was definitely a pro at managing the emotional energy in the room. The more he repeated the refrain, the more something started to stir inside me. I thought to myself, “Are you kidding me? There is no way I’m about to start crying! I know exactly what he’s doing! How is this happening to me?”
I was holding a cloth napkin in my hand and said to myself, “Javier, if you put this napkin over your face, it’s a wrap!” I didn’t feel like I had any say in the matter. I covered my face with the napkin, and immediately the pipes burst! I started sobbing uncontrollably. Tears pouring, nose running, shoulders shaking like I was doing the Bankhead Bounce. I was a mess!
My friend gently rubbed my back and said softly, “It’s okay, you’re okay”. Even in the middle of my sobbing, I had this funny vision of her rubbing my back with one hand and shrugging her shoulders at the same time at everybody else like, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He needs to get it together!”
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one moved by the song, but I know why it hit me the way it did. During everything I was going through, I never cried once. I told myself I had to stay strong because I felt like if I fell apart, it would negatively affect other people. So I suppressed everything I felt, thinking that was the right thing to do. That night, the time for holding it in was over. All the emotions I’d been holding in for over a year finally came pouring out!
When I finally got myself together, she asked how I felt. I told her I felt light, like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders. Then I said, “I want some ice cream!” I have no idea where that came from, but the heart wants what the heart wants.
That night, I needed the freedom to feel what I had been holding in for far too long. I’ll always be thankful to Nisha for making me feel safe enough to let it out and to Quan for creating the kind of space where much needed healing could finally happen.
We all go through struggles, and I believe it’s not what we go through that matters most, it’s how we get through. And how we get through can be a choice. We have emergency response plans for the weather, for if someone’s choking at a restaurant, or if there’s a hazmat spill. Well I believe it’s just as important to have emergency response plans for times in our life when things are difficult and we feel like giving up.
Below is a downloadable resource that can be used and shared with others that you can use to create an emergency response plan to help you can get through whatever struggles you're going through.
And here's a real quick video of me sharing a piece of a poem I wrote called Out of the Blues and why it's important to reach for your tools to help you get through what you're going through. Hope you enjoy it and share it! Thanks!
