It's been a rainbow year for me. Everywhere I go I'm seeing them and I love it. A couple of weeks ago Russ and I went to the grocery store. It was a dark and gloomy day with a sunbreak in the west, and on the way home, there it was--an enormous intensely colored rainbow. In an unusual twist of fate I didn't have *any* camera with me. Not my purse with the purse cam, and not my phone with it's camera. So I just looked at it. Zoomed my eyes out to take in the whole picture, then focused in on the brightest parts. When we got home I grabbed a camera and drove quickly over to the church where I thought I might still be able to see it, but of course the light had shifted and the brilliance had faded. I still sat and watched for a few minutes until the sun had set and the rainbow faded away completely. As I watched though I had a couple of interesting thoughts about rainbows, and once again I thought how true for me the scripture verse is that says that all things bear record of Christ.
The first thought was about how truly big rainbows are. I've had a number of cameras, but I've never had one that can take a picture of a whole rainbow. I always have to take 2 pictures and sometimes even three. That day in the car with Russ it seemed like the rainbow was over all of Hillsboro. I thought how appropriate that was--the rainbow signifies God's promise to the world, and it is so large that it is over the world rather than contained in a small place.
[One day a couple of years ago I had to make an emergency trip to the dentist because of a cracked tooth. The day was so gray--an unusual kind of flat gray. I stopped at costco, all numbed and disgruntled about having to had to go out on this nasty afternoon, and as I pulled into parking lot I saw the beginning of a rainbow. As it formed it was so bright that people just got out of their cars and stood and looked at it. I took 3 pictures and stitched them together to get the picture above. Not sure why my old camera phone made them look more blue than gray though.]
[One evening this spring we went to Jared's lacrosse game. It was gloomy and rainy and I was so grateful that the bleachers were covered! The bleachers were facing east and the almost setting sun was behind us. Off and on throughout the game rainbows formed and dissolved as the sun came out from behind the clouds. It was truly amazing.]
Another thought I had was the realization that almost always, the rainbows come when it is dark. Every now and then you see a bit of a sunny rainbow, but it's usually grey and cloudy and gloomy.
Isn't that just like life? When things are good and sunny we usually don't need more beauty or help. We might not even see or notice it. It takes darkness to be able to see and appreciate the luminescent beauty of the rainbow. And isn't it that way with God's promises and help? When things are good we might not notice or need God's help. But when things are dark, oh how we see then. Just like the rainbows, God's help and gifts stand out to us and we see their true beauty.
[When we were in Hawaii in February we saw some awesome rainbows. This one was unusual because we were on the road to Hana, with the ocean down the mountain. Instead of being like a half circle, this rainbow was closer to a 3/4 circle. It went from the side of the mountain above us, all the way down to the water down the mountain.]
The last thought I had was that it's rare that a camera can truly capture the splendor of a rainbow. We see it and grab the camera and later look at the picture and think about how much brighter, more vivid, simply splendid it had been. Now this makes me think about how amazing our eyes are. But it also makes me think about how amazing the things of God are, and how we can rarely represent them to someone else in their full glory.
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