His promise in a rainbow

I saw, for the first time in my life, the full arch of a rainbow, while driving back from Malacca to Singapore on Easter Sunday. As there were no high-rise buildings in sight, the rainbow was in full view for at least half an hour.

It was bee-oo-tee-full, deserving all four syllables of emphasis! :D

I was in the front passenger seat, and looking through the windshield at the road ahead blending into the sky. The rain had just stopped, and the windshield wipers were turned off. I reached for my water bottle to take a sip from it, and at that very moment, a rainbow - just a quadrant of it was visible, the rest covered by clouds - appeared in the horizon. The colours were at first faint.

I pointed the rainbow out to the rest in the car. It's nice experiencing a rainbow with children too. They make much of the rainbow, enhancing my experience. My niece started explaining the purpose of a rainbow - a promise made by God never to flood the earth again like He did in Noah's time.

(We did not have a camera with us at that time. The following images most closely capture what we saw)

The initial partial arch of the rainbow.
The colours here are closest to what we saw.
It was just a single rainbow.

That was so precious to me - an indication that God is faithful and will always keep His Word. He still keeps a promise made thousands of years ago, and signed His covenant with multi-coloured lights contained in a rainbow.

We talked about the colours in a rainbow...the children said they could only see four, then five.

I glibly recited an acrostic i learnt in primary school, still easily recalled. The mind is an amazing thing! It really has a life of its own. One almost can't control what one remembers and cannot remember...

Richard - Red
Of - Orange
York - Yellow
Gained - Green
Battle - Blue
In - Indigo (more blue)
Vain - Violet (closer to purple)

If you look hard enough, i told the kids, you can see all seven colours. Yes, the last two are hard to tell apart because they are so close.

My niece asked whether we could ever climb the rainbow or get to the end of it. (Talk about chasing rainbows... hehe...)

Well, her mother replied, it's in the sky, and it's too far away.

It's made of lights, i explained.

Yes i remember, exclaimed my niece, my teacher told us the sun splits the light into many colours because of the water droplets. You can make your own rainbow, you know. Just take a transparency, wet it, and then shine a torch on it. You will see the different colours... a mini rainbow.

I smiled. I had forgotten that, so immersed i was in my own meditation on God's faithfulness. I was also regretting we had no camera on hand to take a picture of the rainbow.

Then, the full arch was revealed. I almost gasped: First time i ever see the full arch of a rainbow. The colours also slightly sharpened in focus.

It was slightly longer at both ends. The sky was not so dark.

The clouds behind the rainbow i saw were almost like what was in the photo above.
The ends of the rainbow did not touch the earth though.

God's promise, fully revealed, fully fulfilled, contained in the SEVEN-coloured spectrum of a rainbow stretched across the horizon.

I basked in His LOVE.

It began to rain again, and once again the windshield wipers were at work.

His Promise Still Stands.