On occasion, I need help.
Oy with your snorting. Didn’t we make a resolution about resisting the low hanging fruit? Not we? Just me? Oh. Well, it was too easy anyway. You’re better than that.
Well, the vegetables have been bumped into the oven to roast, the wee Quail (who are we kidding, there is nothing wee about them anymore. The Boy Quail fits into my Birkenstocks) are absorbed in a living-room-consuming Playmobil narrative, the older Quail have set their busy fingers to letter writing and crafting (yes, we are related. They all have my nose), and the Beloved just walked through the sliding glass door (I mean, he opened it first… I am not married to Mr. Bean) smelling of dirt and sunshine. That’s right — spring is inching near us, and after a day of nonstop drizzle, bright sunshine has suddenly peeked out from behind the clouds and is making the light dance on wet leaves and the shy beginnings of flower blooms.
This is actually a beautiful time of year to be in Western Washington, despite all my inner yearnings to be Southern (the truth is, I will probably never have the right kind of hair to pull it off, even if I do tend to wear dangerously high heels in the snow). The early spring light has nothing muted about it, and the snow-capped mountains blaze gold and startling shades of pink and blue in the distance. I used to ache homesick for the dark twilight silhouettes of the orchard in summer; I am finding that God did not forget to make my new skyline enchanting, as well. Silly of me to think otherwise. The glossy leaves of the white magnolia tree are frolicking in a gentle breeze — not warm, but friendly.
And the rainbows are dancing in my kitchen.
I’ve probably written about my kitchen rainbows before, but if I have already forgotten, perhaps you have too (not even kidding about how much I don’t remember of what I say to y’all. The Superior Nephew gently pointed out to me early on, when the overwhelmingly prolific nature of my writing habits became apparent, that there was a noteworthy danger in putting out daily content, in not carefully assessing each word that goes up — namely, I will have to live with what I wrote being available on the internet for absolutely ever. Possibly he was implying that, having glanced at my work, I should really reconsider doing that, but I chose not to read into it). In shameless desire to imitate my maternal grandmother, I have several prisms posted near my kitchen window. After months of darkness, it brought me incredible joy to do my dishes this afternoon with rainbows dancing across the towels and baskets and making patterns on the wooden cupboards.
And still, it took my Eldest Quail to point out, in response to my musing aloud that I had time and inclination to write but was lacking a theme, that maybe I should write about rainbows. She probably meant it, at least in part, as a joke (the way that whenever someone asks what you want for your birthday, you always say “a pony”), but as the Boy Quail spun the hanging prism and we watched the brilliant disco ball effect of the rainbows flickering across the sunshiny room, I realized that she was not only entirely correct, but that it was a stroke of genius.
Because your life needs rainbows today.
And not in the empty, unicorns and fluffy socks sort of way that blindly and feebly hopes there will be a pot of gold at the end of all the gloom. Not worldly hope, which is no hope at all. You need God Himself, Mighty Warrior, hanging up His bow because the arrows of His wrath have already gone out against Another, in your stead. You need promises to hold onto, promises from the One who cannot lie. And you must litter the cupboards of your heart with these promises.
That is the picture — and we are people who need God to spell it out in bright, bold pictures so we don’t miss the obvious. He literally painted it across the sky, so that when we look up to the mountains, when we look for help in all the wrong places, when the tears cloud our vision and our doubts cloud our thinking, we cannot help but to see it — a rainbow. Proof that if you are in Christ, He is not against you. He has called you friend, son, daughter, beloved. He has hung up His bow.
So give me one good reason why you have not plastered your world with His words, with His sure promises! Why would you not begin the day singing it, end the day sighing it, and spend every hour in between hunting for glimpses of it, refracting light across every surface of your mind, illuminating every dark cobwebby corner of your soul? Begin now. Grab ahold of a promise (need a starter? He is strong in your weakness. GO), and hold it up to your day — to your trials, your joys, your work, your play — and look at your world through the shimmering, unchanging light of His glorious truth, FOR YOU.
This is the day to become a chaser of rainbows.
Leave a Reply