ARCHED HOPE

“It’s just splendid!” I told my husband as I craned my neck to see the rainbow that appeared as we were driving home. “Brilliant colors, and a second one is trying to emerge!”

He was a bit disappointed because, as the driver, he couldn’t turn around and see what I was seeing. Finally, he was able to turn off to a side street and pull over long enough for me to snap a photo of the quickly disappearing rainbow.  He accommodates my crazy “photo op” moments.

I wonder how Noah felt as he emerged from the ark--dirty, tired, wondering just how they’d start over in a world that was probably little more than a landscape of mud.  Imagining this, artists have some vegetation growing through the muck of a worldwide flood—enough, of course, that the “scout” dove came back when some greenery in his beak. As the once-swollen black clouds, relieved of their water burden, dissipated, Noah caught sight of the first rainbow. The God-sign of regeneration, it must have been stunning in its brilliant blending of the spectrum’s colors.  I cannot imagine it. Here was hope in an arched palette, and every time it re-appeared, a reminder of the Creator who went way beyond a black and white world.

One passage that always reminds me to hang in there with life’s difficulties is Romans 15:4:

For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.

Noah didn’t have the scriptures, just stories passed down through generations that Moses would later put into written form.  But still, he believed...and obeyed. 

Sometimes I yearn for Noah’s grit in starting over in regard to seemingly impossible things I pray about. Some people I care about (and pray for) are stuck in the false belief that their miserable lives will continue to be miserable. If only they’d get out of the dark, manure-thick pens of the old life in the ark, and have courage to step on the gangplank to a new life with Jesus! If only they’d look up—and see the rainbow!  

An old poem I quoted recently says, “God has not promised skies always blue.” But every so often He hangs a sky-wide reminder that out of the storms, something splendid can emerge. So, yes, I get excited about a rainbow.  It's fleeting, just a few minutes while the sun and drizzle are just right to refract the sun’s rays. But it’s reminder enough to hold onto hope.