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The Colors of Patience

It pours down rain on my drive to church. 
The early trip without the family, to fill the commitment of the making of coffee for those who gather. As I pass through the storm, I take a glance at what has passed behind. I am startled by the reflection of a brilliant rainbow in my mirror. 







I go on with my drive and forget the bow-of-promise as I perform the sabbath duties. I hear the movie quote from the sermon, "It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories... The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? ..." (Lord of the Rings) More water falls, but this time down my face. Even the fictional words barb the heart so raw with the awareness of our reality - too ugly for a big-screen production.

 The youthful pastor weaves the movie lines with the verses about the men wise enough to study and seek and travel to see a Savior. And they lose no heart when the King they find is tiny and helpless and destitute. They see and accept and worship even in the circumstances that seem to make no sense. 


And I find my struggle. Impatience. "To be impatient is to live without hope." (Robert Wilken) My frustration and bitterness and despair come from a resistance to be here in this darkness, in this storm that seems to have no end, like the forty-day downpour that completely engulfed the world and left it none the same. I fight against such transformation. I lose hope that the end is worth reading. I doubt the goodness of God.
The words from the book about the liturgy of the ordinary echo in my ears as I fold the endless piles of laundry and look for the meaning,"God intended man to have all good, ... but in His, God's, time." I have wanted the good now.  "... And therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time." (Hans Urs Van Balshasar) "Breaking out" - yes, that sums it up. I want to break out - of this space in time that involves so many places where "we shouldn't even be, but we are:" detention, family separation, marriage struggles, so much counseling, rejection by friends and saints, court cases, probation, injustice, and fear and pain and pain and more pain. Can I break out? Because I would if I could. Or can I just be as patient as a fallow field? Can I wait?








More wisdom from her whom I seek for prayer and a sense of being held, "'Wait on the Lord' is a command ... AND a promise. We wait because He is at work." Wait. Be patient. Open hands to this time. See Him here. Seek Him here. Believe the light wins and the darkness gives way. The colors of hope came to the ark-builder as he stood in the mud and mess and aftermath of the world so unfamiliar. We see the storybook images of the clear blue sky filled with the arching rainbow, but science reveals there is no bow of colors unless the rain still lingers. Even Noah's storm was not completely over. 



The rain still falls, but the storm is passing. I glance behind and the black is there still, but so are the brilliant colors, the promise that not everything will be lost. And in this position, before me, there is nothing but the blinding light on the path ahead. 





"But in the end... even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer." (Lord of the Rings)



"Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God." Psalm 42:11


"But they that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength;

they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint." Isaiah 40:31




"Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." Romans 5:3-4

"I will place my rainbow in the clouds, and it will become a guarantee of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, then I will remember my covenant with you and with all living creatures of all kinds. Never again will the waters become a flood and destroy all living things." Genesis 9:13-15

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