The Rainbow's Promise

We've had a couple of rainy days here lately and as I was driving home today, a double rainbow was front and center in my line of vision for more than 10 minutes. At first my thought "Thank you Lord! What a beautiful rainbow!" but within minutes, tears were streaming down my face and all I could say was, "Thank you Lord...thank you." I've never had this reaction to a rainbow before, usually I admire their beauty and think of my grandma (who LOVES rainbows!) and then my thoughts are on to other things. Not so today.

As I was looking at the rainbow, I was thinking about the promise God gave when He created the first rainbow in the book of Genesis. God tells Noah He will never again flood the earth to the extent He just had - to the point that He told Noah to build an ark and any person or animal not on that ark was dead before the rain even stopped falling. The rainbow was a promise of God's faithfulness and mercy.

Then my thoughts took me back farther to the beginning of Noah's account in the Bible where God decided to send the flood.

"The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.  So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them." Genesis 6:5-7

It seems crazy to type this now but it wasn't too many years ago when I was convinced that God was so disappointed with me that He was sorry He even created me. I kid you not, this thought consumed me on a daily basis. I just knew I was such a miserable disappointment in God's eyes that He would look at me and just shake His head wondering what in the world He was thinking when He knit me together in my mother's womb. Seriously. These were my thoughts. Constantly.

These took place in the couple of years before I was diagnosed with major depression in 2009, when I was smack in the middle of a deep, horrible darkness I couldn't even explain, let alone find my way out of. Recently, I was talking with a friend about my depression and she was honest in saying she couldn't relate because she had never experienced anything like the darkness I was describing. Since then, I've been trying to think of how to explain depression and today I would describe it as that voice repeatedly telling me God was sorry He had created me. In my heart of hearts, and my intellectual mind, I knew that voice was definitely not the voice of God, that He would never say such things to me. It was the depression speaking and man, was it loud!

In the years since then, medication and the prayers of those who walked me through that dark time have done miracles. I can't even remember the last time I heard the voice of depression speaking those lies to me. It's been such a long time and I'm in such a good place now, that it was hard to even imagine that I ever had those thoughts at all!

I have a feeling I will always see rainbows in a different light after today. Not only are they a reminder of the promise God made so long ago to a man of great faith, they are a reminder of how far God has brought me since that time of extreme darkness years ago. In the words of Steven Curtis Chapman, "My Redeemer is faithful and true."