SURPRISED BY JOY: GOD'S GRANDEUR

(With apologies to C.S. Lewis and Gerard Manley Hopkins)

It was a very dark sky that greeted me as I gazed out of a westward-facing window in our
office building. Trouble coming, I thought.... I returned to my office on the other side of
the building and continued to work at my desk. Glancing up through slanted blinds
several minutes later, I noticed dark clouds had gathered, lumpy gray accumulations in
the eastern sky. Moments later, a jagged flash of lightning caught my attention. Enshrined
by brick and glass, I never heard the thunder that surely followed. I tried to get back to
my work, but my attention kept wandering back to the sky...clouds hold such fascination.
Then - there they were! Two bright rainbows stretching in almost complete semicircular
arcs across the width of my window.

Blinds up! The inner bow, brighter and sharper, richly reddest near the horizon,
possessed at least one pink fringe underneath it, but close by - a supernumerary bow,
courtesy of the wave nature of light. Above this magnificent display stood the secondary
bow, fainter and larger, but an awesome spectacle nonetheless. Its colors, displayed in
reverse from red out to violet, seemed almost a mirror image of its brighter sibling.
Between the two arced a broad swath of "less-light": Alexander's dark band.

This display lasted several minutes. The arcs receded from the northern horizon until only
two slightly tilted bright bands of color remained, like painted spikes. The inner one
seemed to grow brighter as the raindrops from whence it came moved further southeast,
nudged along by the wind. In joyful exultation a few of us, intrigued and absorbed in
these shared moments, returned to our by now seemingly mundane duties. But my
appetite for displays of God's grandeur was undiminished. By now another scene had
been painted - Mammatus cloud, projecting downward from the storm base quietly
informed me that I should wait in patient expectation. I decided to return to the
westward window....

The sky was mottled and mixed. Blue clear sky plus cloud, golden-tinged from the setting
sun, divided by rich pink light filtered from thick multiplied cloud cover, all this equaled
excitement! Enthralled, I saw a huge anvil cloud, its thunderhead pointing toward the
south. Looking more closely, I could discern wave after wave of low-flying birds in "V"
formation, gliding and undulating over the tree tops, near and far towards, it seemed, the
setting sun.

It was enough. I was filled to capacity with deep joy, joy that was multicolored like the
rainbow splashed across the sky, richly blessed from head to toe by a combined display
of power and beauty, subtlety and gentleness. Lord, what a gift You gave to me in
those twenty sacred minutes.

So why don't I recognize Your presence more often in the other fourteen hundred and
twenty?
John Adam (2/5/99)