Clearly Perceived
I was in the car the other evening driving home from work. The first thing I noticed was the sun was setting a little later. I love when the days start stretching out. It’s a little reminder that Spring and Summer are on their way. It was overcast and I glanced over to my left. I saw a strip of rainbow falling from the clouds.
For the next seven minutes or so, I did all I could to fix my gaze on the blossoming chord of light – while staying in my lane behind the wheel. It felt like the colors were coming towards me and before I knew it I was seeing shades in a rainbow I’d never seen before. The vividness was unmatched. It continued to expand to where I could see the full arc from beginning to end.
It was the “otherness” that struck me. We’d seen rain for the past four or five days and then out of nowhere this blast of colors forms in the air. It’s one thing to imagine a beautiful thing, it’s a whole other thing to experience that beauty – that was me in my car.
The sight was quite literally glorious. And for those moments the bigness of the rainbow made everything in my life pale in comparison. There are always things in our lives we can worry about, dread about, fear about. And those things are real. But when we get a taste of something bigger, oh, does it not shift our perspective a tad? And make those giants shrink to look like action figures. That’s what it did for me.
It reminded me of Paul’s words in the first chapter of Romans. He says, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:18-20).
What’s Paul saying here? – “Look outside.” God’s vastness is all around us all the time. We can see God in the things He has made. He’s made everything, therefore, it all points to Him. The cool thing about beauty is that there are times, like the rainbow, when it shows up to us when we aren’t looking. What’s also amazing about beauty is that when we go looking for it, we can always find it.
When’s the last time you noticed something beautiful? Something that pulled you back, took your breath, to the point where you truly felt for a moment that it was going to be OK. Beauty does that, doesn’t it? It brings a sense of peace and calm, where apart from it was chaos and confusion.
Friend, I want to challenge you today. Find something beautiful and linger with it a moment or two longer than you normally would. Allow yourself to say out loud – thank you. There is real, actual peace to be found when we see God. Maybe for you it’s a tree, the sky, or the ocean – for me it was an unexpected rainbow. His Word says we can see Him in the things He has made. Let’s together take a moment to simply – look outside.
