I’d like to say everything got better right away. Or got better at all, even a tiny bit. But sometimes when people hit rock bottom, they start digging.

Or, in this case, they started dodging raindrops.

Although the Lord loved the world he had made, he didn’t love how worldly it had become. God saw that the people he created in his image had become super-duper naughty. Everything they were thinking about and dreaming about was really bad all the time, which was absolutely not very good.

So God made it rain. A lot. Nonstop. Without a break. For forty days and forty nights. It was God’s way of wiping away the stain of sin.

When the Lord looked over the whole world, only one man found favor in his eyes. That was Noah. He was righteous and walked with God. Which doesn’t mean God and Noah took strolls around the block together. It means Noah did things God’s way, just like Adam was supposed to do (but didn’t).

Before the rain came (and came and came and came), God gave Noah an assignment: “Make yourself an ark.” Not an arcade. Not an architect. And definitely not an aardvark. But an ark—a really big boat. Noah made such a big boat that it had room for his wife, his three sons and their wives, and two of every kind of animal—even aardvarks.

When Noah had been in the ark for almost a year, he sent out some birds. First a raven and then a dove. Finally, the dove did not return to the ark. He must have found a place to live. So Noah waited a bit longer, and a teeny bit more, and eventually, after more than a year of being cooped up in a great big floating chicken coop, Noah and his family and all the animals—even the chickens—got off the boat.

Then God did something brilliant. Literally. He hung a rainbow in the sky as a sign of his covenant with Noah. Never again would God destroy the earth with a flood. The Lord was starting over again with a new family in his new dried-out world.