Beyond Imagination

I felt a chill in the air as I looked outside our picture window, into the cold, gray sky.  It was drizzling rain.  Such a disappointment, since the day before, had been close to 70 and sunny.  It was only February, but the unseasonably warm weather that week had spoiled us a bit.  Turning off the heat, opening the windows, and hearing the peepers seemed to trick our minds into thinking it was spring.  February in Northwestern PA typically had us buried under several feet of snow.  Realizing this, I adjusted my attitude towards the rain, thinking how grateful I was that I didn’t have to shovel.

As I was helping my daughters work on homework, I noticed a distinct patch of grass in our backyard was surprisingly bright green.  Looking up into the clouds, thankful for the peek of sunshine, my eyes met something that created in me a sense of girlhood wonder.  There was a bright, double rainbow, clear and brilliant.  As I called my children over, I realized why it seemed so unusually beautiful to me.  In addition to the typical rainbow colors, ROY G. BIV, as we had learned in grade school, there were three or four more colors past the purple shade.  A brilliant pink, a vivid yellow, and a piercing aqua blue.  It seemed as there were actually a couple more colors in there, but I don’t even know what to call them.  They were not shades I have ever seen before.  “The impossible colors!” my daughter yelled out,  “It’s the colors from heaven!”  We had been talking about heaven in the last couple of weeks since both of my grandparents had passed away suddenly.  We talked about how excited we would be to see them again one day, and imagining what their new home looked like.  My grandparents raised me like their own daughter, so for me, the heavy weight of grief was somehow relieved as I imagined them walking on streets of gold with beautiful rainbows in the sky.  My middle daughter, Adelyne, is a young artist, and her favorite thing in the world is to blend colors in paint.  She and I had long talks about what colors would be in heaven, and how we couldn’t even imagine something we have never seen or made with her paints here on earth.

Here they were, those colors we had just been imagining, right in front of our very eyes.  In addition to that, we realized that there was suddenly a second rainbow above the first one.  Something was off though.  It was brilliant and beautiful, and upside down.  UPSIDE DOWN!  On top of a rainbow with brilliant new colors, there was an upside-down rainbow!  I had never seen anything before like it in my entire life!  My girls and I stood there, speechless, watching the sky….. and then as simply and quickly as it came, it left.

“There’s so much more to me than you can even imagine.”

I heard the whisper.  “Lord!”  I prayed.  “Thank you for showing me that!”  More than once, at other times in my life, God had used a rainbow to encourage me.  But this time, it felt different.  This time, it was if God was preparing my heart to seek Him in a new way.  With a fresh heart and a fresh view, I realized that God has so much in store for us.  Even things we think are impossible.

I originally wrote a similar version of this post for my editor, Warner Press.  Feel free to check that one out at: https://www.warnerpress.org/blog/post/impossible-colors