Faith & Spirit Quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach

Breathnach writes like a secular priest of the self-help age: part devotional, part weather report, engineered to make endurance feel not just possible but scheduled. The line breaks into imperatives ("Expect... Expect...") that smuggle agency back to the reader. You may not control the drought, but you can control the stance you take toward it. "Expect" is doing heavy psychological work here, turning hope from a fragile wish into a practiced discipline.

The subtext is a bargain with despair. By promising that "dry seasons" are temporary, the quote offers a narrative structure to suffering: not random, not infinite, not meaningless, but cyclical. That framing matters because it counters the way hardship distorts time, making the present feel permanent. The metaphor of "spring rains" isn't just pretty; it's strategically ordinary. Rain is inevitable, familiar, almost banal. The reassurance lands precisely because it avoids grand miracles while still allowing for them: "prayers... answered in wondrous ways" keeps the door open for the mystical without requiring a specific theology or outcome.

Contextually, Breathnach comes out of late-20th-century American spirituality, where traditional religious language is repurposed for a broad readership hungry for comfort but wary of doctrine. The quote’s intent is pastoral: to stabilize an inner life, to redirect attention from the question "Why is this happening?" to "What if this passes?" It works because it treats hope as a forecast you can live by, not a mood you have to earn.