It comes in all shapes and shades, is non-discriminate and has little regard for timing.
It’s the yin that adds wrinkles to our otherwise smooth complexions.
Because my wife and I have had more than our share in our 31 years together – and I’m not talking minor stuff here – I’ve asked her to help me with this post. Quite honestly, she’s been heroic in her handling of it all.
Just recently we discussed all the hardships we’ve endured and commented that each one, by themselves, would put such a strain on a marriage that many couples can’t even.
And we counted them off, naming them one by one…and listed our Mitchell life crises on two hands! Yet, ONLY by God’s grace that succors and sustains, we’re still here, stronger in matrimonial tie than ever, and with unbridled adoration for the God-who-sees-and-knows.
So I rolled down the hall with a whale of an idea for a post and found Sandy, propped up on pillows, reading.
Here’s what President Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright (I know, I know) interpreted from it in a sermon preached 20 years ago:
“with her clothes in rags, her body scarred and bruised and bleeding, her harp all but destroyed and with only one string left, she had the audacity to make music and praise God … To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope … that’s the real word God will have us hear from this passage and from [George Fredrick] Watt’s painting.”
Funny thing about rainbows, they’re actually circles, not half-arcs. Obviously they look like arches to us because of our limited perspective, seeing only half the story because the horizon kind of gets in the way.
My lovely spotted the colorful band stretched over the cemetery where our son’s body was laid to rest last Christmas as we made our approach. It was our thirty-first wedding anniversary and we wanted to share our celebration with our boy. Sandy often wants me to drive the long way around Mozley Gardens to pay respects to any of Graham’s new “neighbors” before we park at his marker, so I was poking along scanning the lawns out my driver’s side window when I heard her exclaim:
“Oh honey, look!”
I followed her graceful index finger as it stretched toward the windshield.
A bow of beauty.
The Sovereign had kissed our evening by finger-painting a swath of grace over our Gra-Gra.
Well, that’s all she wrote. We were undone. Verklempt. A wet mess.
In a good way.
“I know about the promise of God to not destroy the earth with floods,” my bride offered, “but what else do you think God is saying?”
I was already in that vein, the Bible teacher in me calling up the Revelator’s vision of God on His throne in His abode of heaven. Verse three says “around the throne” was a rainbow and a quick study suggests it’s a full circle, as rainbows tend to be.
A perfect circle.
No beginning, no end. No pause, no break. No altered course, but fulfillment and wholeness.
Eternality.
God said, “look up.”
We lifted our watery eyes.
“See My initials in sweeping, color-laden script?”
We indeed saw the stamp of Resurrection.
The “all things new” seal of Certainty.
We’re two still-grieving parents encased in the drama of loss, sighing at the memories and could-have-beens, making our repeated pilgrimage to the sacred stone…
BUT WE’RE
…gently carried all the while (yet again!) by everlasting Arms that scaffold our temporal home with rainbows to remind us
that Eternity awaits,
that these eyes only see half the picture,
that the Best is yet to be,
that the grace that pavilions us in these years of dust and ash,
will give way to Endless Dawn, forever illuminated by the Sun and Daystar of our souls, Jesus the Christ and Father of Lights.
That rainbow reminded us that His exhaustive archives of eternity and our place (and Graham’s!!!) in the Eternal Story is not a half-arc (half done), but a complete arc, and – my beloved fellow pilgrim – let it serve to tell you that God wastes none of your raw materials in preparing you for His Glory. All of it goes into the flourish of His finishing touches.
