Giving Birth Again, Broken Rainbows & Giveaways!
Why am I thinking about Rainbows? It’s been a baby week more than a rainbow week. My fifth grandson was born this week—and I was wondrously invited into the place of his birth. What holy hours those were, keeping space with such pain and only pain. I relived my own six aching births in those hours—-and then he appears. In that moment, all that is old becomes new again.
Rainbows are not the same but I cannot miss the connection.
I see them most at Harvester Island, where they come in storm, in the midnight light, shot between clouds. The light-shaft glows, shimmers, shoots, bends into ghostly bleeding hues——but never stays. Everything but permanence.
This is the sign God chose for his promise. “I will never destroy the earth by flood again.”
Why did God choose a misty apparition for his eternal promise?
Why does God choose babies to bring heaven near? Like the rainbow, they come after and through a storm. Then they appear, ripping the body wide, shooting light from Heaven. We gasp and weep at his coming.
This happened two millennia ago as well. That whimpering just-born babe wrapped and held in an animal’s trough brought kings and wise men, weeping, to their knees. That infant body bore the weight of an eternal promise: That God would come down among his people and restore them as his beloved.
I cannot imagine any weaker vessels than a mewling newborn and a vaporous rainbow to bear the weight of glory, the brilliance of eternity, the force of God’s never-ending love.
Yet they do.
They are here for us.
If we open our eyes and our arms to the flash of their radiant light,
we too can be bent and bowed into shimmering prisms.
We too can be born anew.
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Gifts for you!
Dear Friends, Do you need this as much as I do? I edited this new book (with my friend Paul Willis) because it’s dark right now. So dark. But there IS a birth of such radiance that changes everything. All is new.
We have gathered some of the wisest writers of our time who will set the season aflame for all of us with joy and hope: Richard Foster, Eugene Peterson, Luci Shaw. Philip Yancey, Madeleine L’Engle, Walter Wangerin, Lauren Winner, and many others!
I’m giving away THREE books this week! Would you help me share the “light” of these extraordinary poems, stories, meditations (and my never-before-published theatre piece that several churches have performed)?
Here’s how you can win one of these books:
Share this post on your social media. OR share a post about the book.
Let me know you’ve done this in the comments below.
Include your email so I can contact you for your mailing address.