itsawonderfilledlife

“Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”
John 4:48
Just as the windy, rainy, stormy night was coming to an end, the sun rose in awesome splendor. The heavy, pelting monsoons had diminished to a morning sun shower. As I saw the bright light of the sun, and imagined it being refracted in the drops of rain, I anticipated a most perfect scenario for a rainbow.

With that anticipation, came hope …

What is it about rainbows? How is it that such a natural, frequent phenomenon can make a person, who holds tightly to logic, hop on the superstition band wagon?

I expect we can look to the Bible, and the story of Noah, for where our human, hopeful hold first began.

In the story of Noah, in Genesis (5-10), the Earth is filled with evil people. God has Noah built an enormous ark, fill it with animals, then board it, along with all of his family. The family are tossed around on the waves, while the Earth is erased of the rest of it’s inhabitants, for well over forty days and nights. When dry ground is located, and the ark has come to a stop, Noah and his family disembark onto terra firma, to start over.

Not only do they get to start fresh, but God makes a big promise to them … that he will never again flood the Earth, killing all living things in it’s wake. And, as a symbol to remind all of this promise, a rainbow will appear after the rains fall (Genesis 9:12-16).

When I see a rainbow, I am reminded of that promise, and I am filled with hope that it’s appearance in my day is a reminder that everything will be alright, that the days will be better and brighter (both figuratively and literally), that better days are ahead than those behind.

I wonder what Noah thought, what his family thought.

A rainbow … a symbol of a promise … a promise of life … a hope-filled promise.

… and they all lived happily ever after …

NOT!

Only about three hundred years after the flood, we have the story of the people, full of greed, full of sin, full of … themselves building a tower (known as the Tower of Babel) to reach the heavens.

And, only days after seeing a rainbow we get that undesired report from the doctor, our workplace is downsizing (and we get the pink slip), our spouse is no longer in love with us, we discover that our child is struggling with a drug addiction …

Where is the promise? Where is the life? Where is the hope?

The promise has not changed … nor has humanity.

Just like the man who asked Jesus to heal his son, in John 4, we too are looking for divine intervention … for signs and wonders.

But, it is Romans 8:24 that reminds us that hope does not have to be something we see, like a rainbow …

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all.”

There is no magic in a rainbow, that is simply the visual reminder that the unseen God is where our hope should rest.