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Dear Friends,
On a recent walk in the countryside I saw a beautiful rainbow.
It arched over the fields and looked absolutely stunning.
This wonder of nature filled me with a sense of hope and happiness.
The rainbow has a long history as a sign of hope on the spiritual journey of life.
In the story of Noah the rainbow is a symbol of the promise that God made to the people who were saved from the earth’s destruction.
There is a hopeful power in the story of Noah, the tale of a person who braved long, lonely moments, wondering what life was worth when all he knew was being destroyed.
He must have questioned how he and his family would survive.
The moment when Noah opened the window and sent out the dove is special and filled with hope.
Noah is everyone of us when we sit in our discouragement, calling out to God or others; ‘tell me about hope; give me reason to believe; help me to trust in the goodness of life; enable me to find my courage and to enthuse about life again; tell me about the meaning of life’.
What a profound confirmation of hope it was for Noah when the dove came back bearing the tiny sprig of green in its beak, the green which said; ‘welcome into new life.
Here is a gift of hope for you. Believe in the future. Trust what is to come.
All will be well’.
The rainbow has become a sign of the promises God makes to all of us who go on searching, struggling, dreaming and believing while on the human journey.
The rainbow announced hope to Noah and continues to proclaim hope to us.
Sometimes it is hard to think of hope when the world is filled with war and so many lives are filled with pain and conflict, struggles and darkness.
To ‘hope’ is more than just to wish for something. It is to yearn for and to dream something so much that we really believe it can happen.
To hope is to have a strong, clear vision of the future.
To hope is to know the God of hope, the God of promise, the one who has already taken us out of darkness into wonderful light.
The question we need to ask ourselves is do we love God enough to trust that He will be with us whatever our trials and tribulations might be?
Do we love enough to send out a dove and to look for signs of rainbows in the sky?
Trust is a gradual, growing thing.
We keep giving ourselves to God and then, taking ourselves back.
We need to be aware of keeping our hope alive, of taking our trust to deeper depths.
Hope just doesn’t happen. It has to be nurtured in the human heart.
We need to have a time each day to recall God’s presence and believe again in the beauty and wonder around us.
Then when you see a rainbow in the sky, praise its maker.
Lift up your heart in hope and share that hope with others.
Every blessing,
Rev. Diane Hicks
Letter from our Minister
Rev. Diane Hicks
