Rainbow connection

“Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true.”
– Richard Bach

Something came to me the other day as my little brother and I were discussing a beautiful rainbow we’d seen on a Route 66 trip to Tucumcari a few years ago.

Oliver and I were just coming out of the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo when the sky turned black and began pelting us with fat raindrops. By the time I pulled out of the parking lot, we were in the middle of a heavy downpour, and a spectacular electrical storm was flashing across the Panhandle sky, each lightning bolt striking the flat land with a kind of terrifying beauty.

I could see a hint of light near the western horizon, and I knew the storm wouldn’t last long. We drove out from under it somewhere near Vega, and a dazzling sunset emerged from behind the clouds.

Somewhere between Vega and Adrian, Oliver gasped: “Oh, my God. Look behind us.”

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw … nothing. I looked in the driver’s side mirror. Nothing. I looked in the passenger’s side mirror. Nothing.

I stopped the car and turned to look out the window behind us. Stretching across that early evening sky was the biggest, most intense rainbow I’d ever seen. It was so vast that my rearview mirrors, with their limited viewpoint, simply couldn’t pick it up. The image was truly stunning, and of course I couldn’t resist taking advantage of the striking backdrop and the gentle golden light to snap what has become my favorite portrait of my little brother.

Oliver and I were telling his wife about that rainbow the other day when Oliver mentioned that it was unusual to see both ends of a rainbow touching the horizon, and especially unusual to see both ends of a double rainbow.

I said I’d read somewhere that every rainbow is a double, and that a rainbow accompanies every rain, but whether you see it depends entirely on where you are standing relative to the light, the water, and whatever trees or buildings might obscure the view.

It came to me that God tends to be the same way: Divine Truth is always there, but whether we see it through our storms depends entirely on our point of view.

Sometimes we’re standing in a quiet, open space with a completely unobstructed view of the light shining through the rain and projecting its many colors onto the clouds for us to see. Other times, we’re on the wrong side of the storm, or there’s too much clutter on the horizon, or our view is just too narrow to pick it up. But whether we see it or not, Truth — God, divine Love — is, like the rainbow, always there through all our storms.

“Truth never destroys God’s idea. Truth is spiritual, eternal substance, which cannot destroy the right reflection. Corporeal sense, or error, may seem to hide Truth, health, harmony, and Science, as the mist obscures the sun or the mountain; but Science, the sunshine of Truth, will melt away the shadow and reveal the celestial peaks.”

– Mary Baker Eddy