Faith & Spirit Quote by James Whitcomb Riley

Refusing to gripe is Riley's folksy act of defiance against a culture of low-grade complaining. The line opens like a neighborly scold - "no use to grumble and complain" - but it quickly pivots into a sly economic argument: rejoicing is "just as cheap and easy". That thrift-store pragmatism is the hook. He isn't selling optimism as a virtue; he's selling it as a better bargain, a practical choice anyone can afford.

The God-and-weather framing matters. Riley writes in an America where Protestant common sense and farm-country reality sit in the same sentence: you don't control the sky, you adapt to it. By giving God the job of "sort[ing] out the weather", he shifts the reader from entitlement to acceptance. Complaining becomes not only tedious but slightly presumptuous, as if the world owed you sunshine on demand. The subtext isn't passive resignation, though. It's about agency in the one place you still have it: your stance toward what arrives.

"Why, rain's my choice" is the rhetorical flourish that makes the moral stick. It's conversational, almost comic - that "Why" is a shrug you can hear - and it turns what most people treat as a minor tragedy into a preference. Riley, a poet of dialect and everyday speech, aims his wisdom at ordinary discouragement: missed plans, hard work, bad luck. He doesn't deny discomfort; he reframes it as a rehearsal for resilience, a way of choosing gratitude without needing conditions to cooperate.