Jan 25 2008
This Morning
It’s been raining for four days now in Southern California. Severe hulking clouds strut about the sky and occasionally inundate us like surprise concentrated shots from a squirt gun. It would be rainless one moment and a deluge the next, like a kind of meteorological game of peek-a-boo I’d rather not play.
Then on my way to work today, I saw a sight I haven’t seen since childhood. A rainbow. An honest to God rainbow arching from horizon to horizon. It wasn’t the vague kind of color effects like the kind you see from a water sprinkler. It was clear, distinct; it had a definite form chiseled from the lumpy dark gray rainclouds languishing behind it.
Like a burst of hope, it flashed brilliant in the morning for only a minute. The rainbow spread open-armed from above the buildings of Manhattan Beach and it ended somewhere off into the Pacific Ocean.
Then, as sudden as it appeared, it dissolved in the faint morning drizzle.
I had stopped on the damp sidewalk with my umbrella shielding my head from the wispy flecks of rain on my way to work. I happened to look around and I noticed that only a couple of people had stopped to see it.
When it vanished, I turned and continued my walk to work. I felt like God was ruffling my hair and had given me a little taste of His Kingdom of Heaven, a morsel of delight.