I’m sure it’s happened to you, too…you’re walking or driving along, eyes on the road, and someone declares: “Look! A rainbow!”
If someone hadn’t called out, you might have passed by without recognizing the beauty before you. Caught up in the cares of the moment, you needed someone else to point it out to you.
A rainbow occurs when light shines through water droplets in the atmosphere. Bending light creates the arc-shaped miracle we all learned to draw in preschool. When light bounces around a raindrop, beauty reveals itself.
The best possibility for a rainbow is when sunlight hits a raindrop at 42 degrees. This means that those looking for rainbows in the morning and the evening are more likely to be successful. This also explains why rainbows are often sighted at waterfalls. And because you need both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow, anticipate beauty after a storm.
A rainbow is seen through the eye. It’s a unique combination of eye, angle, moisture, and light. Beautifully ethereal, a rainbow is a combination of specific rays of light shining through specific water droplets, seen from a specific angle of view.
Here’s the amazing thing: because of these factors, no person sees the same rainbow. It’s impossible to have two people stand in the exact same spot simultaneously. Therefore, we may both see a rainbow in the same location, but it’s a completely different rainbow.
Isn’t that grace? It may look like something you’ve seen before. It may remind you of grace in someone else’s life. It may hold similar color and hue, and come out of a similar storm. It may remind you of something you’ve seen on another day. But grace—God’s kindness to those who do not deserve it—is designed, applied, and revealed individually and uniquely by a loving Father.
A rainbow is fresh, new, incandescent, and original. The rainbow you see is only your rainbow. When you share that vision with someone else, then the rainbow they see is only their rainbow—completely different than yours.
That is grace, too.
Going through a storm? Look to the light. See a rainbow? Tell someone else. They just might be able to see a rainbow from where they are standing, too.
“But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
—2 Corinthians 12:9 ESV
