A Trick of the Light
I leaned over the guardrails on the cliffside, peering over the deep ravine formed by the Yellowstone River. Farther up the river, the glistening waters of Yellowstone Falls cascaded down the tawny rockface dotted by patches of lush green and pine trees.
Through the mist emanating from the falls, a faint rainbow appeared. I lifted my camera, anxious to capture the rare moment, and snapped the photo. I pulled the camera away from my face, and it was gone.
I continued walking the trail. A hurried man strapped with expensive camera equipment stopped and asked us a question. Did you see the rainbow?
I did a way back, I said. He said it was supposed to appear around nine in the morning. I guess I had gotten lucky. If you go that way now, you might catch it, I told him. A few hours later, I ran into him again. He had missed it.
Who knew how long he had been preparing for that moment? The day had been sunny and clear—not a cloud in the sky. The conditions were perfect. He knew where to be and when. But when the time came, the rare sight evaded him.
The last time I remember the rainbow being mentioned was in Sunday School. Over coloring pages and kid-friendly Bibles, we learned about the great flood and the beautiful rainbow that God bestowed upon Noah and his family after they had been stranded on an earth-encompassing ocean for over a year. In Genesis, God said, "I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth."
After the fall, the Noahic Covenant is the first promise God made to humanity. It stands uniquely in principle: while most of God's Old Testament promises are inextricably tied to the coming Christ or eternal salvation, the rainbow is simply God's promise that he won't wipe out humankind by way of water—a sign of God's mercy on Noah and his grace in allowing us life when we should all have been drowned on account of our wickedness. For now, judgment is suspended. The rainbow means we have hope, clemency, a fresh start.
And thousands of years after the fact, rainbows occasionally bend across our skies, and other than offering a pleasing sight, remind us of a hopeful promise of days gone by. And as we're taught in elementary school science, certain conditions need to combine for a rainbow to occur, namely, light and water. But typically, the latter component is only supplied during a storm. I wonder if the clouds graciously allowed a beam of light to break through the storm at Camp Mystic, and the girls were able to see the brilliant colors before being swallowed by floodwaters.
I wonder if the children hiding under their desks behind a locked door, look down at their multicolored pack of crayons and think of better things as shots ring in the distance. I wonder if the civilians starving in Gaza had looked at the rubble that was once a sprawling urban landscape and missed the days that were full of color.
Why would God choose rainbows to symbolize his promises? The rainbow: a fleeting image, a trick of the light, a mirage. Intangible beauty. So fleeting, you can almost convince yourself that you didn't see it. That it had meant nothing. That you created beauty out of suffering simply to cope with the storms of this world.
I remember being a kid and biking down a neighborhood street, luminescent and slick from a passing storm. I would look up, and to my great astonishment, a colorful arch appeared across the overcast sky. I would speed up, turning the pedals on my bike until they started automatically flipping over in hurried successions. If I could just get closer to this beautiful sight, it would become more real, I thought. But before I could reach it, the vibrant hues faded back into dreary grey.
Were God's promises like that? Were they apparent in short moments, and gone the next? Were they nothing more than a vapid blip of color in a long, stormy day? Why couldn't He have used something more reliable to symbolize his promise, like a sturdy Colorado mountain or a thousand-year-old California Sequoia?
It's no wonder people lose hope in God's promises, especially when the storms and suffering of this world feel much more real than the fleeting phenomena of a rainbow. When I walk down the street, passing the rainbow flags posted outside of cafes, bookstores, universities, and churches, I wonder how God allowed a symbol of his mercy and kindness to become a symbol glorifying self, lust, and the rejection of the sacred. The world must have lost hope in God's promises and, in turn, created its own.
But the early followers of Christ didn't claim the rainbow as a symbol of God's promises. They claimed the tree, the torture device used to humiliate the only perfect man who ever existed. They chose the cross—the icon of a God who didn't merely watch us suffer, but suffered with us.
Aside from the Noahic covenant, God makes thousands of promises in the Bible. One of these is suffering. "In the world, you will have tribulation," Christ says. "But take heart; I have overcome the world." God's promises to us—of hope, peace, and steadfast love—aren't suspended when we experience intense, and often devastating, suffering. Rather, his promises help us suffer well. In his letter to the church of Phillipi, Paul the Apostle wrote that he could "do all things through Christ who strengthens." He didn't say that Christ delivered him from pain. Rather, he allowed him to be content within it. He understood how "both to abound and to suffer need."
In the midst of a storm, our perspective is encompassed and obscured by the circumstances around us: the torrential downpour, the lightning flashes, the ear-splitting thunder. But all it takes is a small beam of light breaking through the clouds for the whole spectrum of color to be revealed. When sunlight enters through droplets of water, typically from rain, the droplets refract the light. They make our eyes perceive something that wasn't perceptible before, just as God's promises give meaning to our suffering. And like rainbows only appear with a storm, sometimes it is only through suffering that we may see the full beauty of God.
These truths can be hard to swallow when tragedies hit close to home. The campers at Camp Mystic succumbed to one of the worst fates on earth, the same fate that humanity suffered under the judgment of the Great Flood. But God has far from failed them; his covenant was far from broken. Because our hope lies not in the absence of suffering and death in this life, but in the bliss that lies beyond. Had they seen a small beam of colorful glory, I pray they were reminded of the gracious God they would soon see face-to-face.
I plugged my SD card into my laptop and scrolled through the photographs I had taken during my trip. I reached the photo I had taken that day in Yellowstone. Magnificent waters hurled themselves off a cliffside, into the winding river encased by two steep valleys.
In the bottom right-hand corner, an interesting visual appeared. A glimpse of color. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple illuminated the cliffside. It was faint—hardly noticeable. But what my eye was drawn to was not this, but a silhouette of a sprawling tree emerging from the cliffside: old and rugged.