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BY ROZELLA HARDIN
Editorial Director
rozella.hardin@elizabethton.com
My front yard is filled with zinnias and snapdragons — of all colors — which keep coming back each summer from seed which the flowers shed over the course of the season. I delight in sitting on the porch and watching the butterflies flit from flower to flower. Also, each afternoon a pair of gold finches usually visit the flower garden — often three or four times. They will affix their tiny legs around the stem of the zinnia close to the blossom and will work feverishly with their beaks pulling the petals one by one from the flower, dropping them to the ground.
Tuesday evening after the hard thundershower, which occurred late, I sat down on the porch hoping to get a glimpse of the tiny birds if they visited the flower garden. Instead, my eyes were drawn to a partial rainbow in the eastern sky. I watched the rainbow until it faded from the sky. 
As I viewed the rainbow I was reminded that it takes both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow.
Did you know that when you look up at a rainbow, you and God have your eyes fastened on each other.
Remember the story of the first rainbow after the great flood which destroyed the earth? God placed the rainbow in the sky as a sign of the covenant made with Noah that never again would He destroy the earth with water. Catch verse 16 of Genesis 9: “When the bow is in the cloud, and I will look upon it…” Thus, when God looks at the rainbow from above, and you look at it from below, your and God’s eyes meet. Doesn’t that make the rainbow all the more special and the result is that you often admire the rainbow as long as it appears in the sky.
A rainbow is also a sign of God’s mercy, which He tells us in Jeremiah “are new every day.” We see the rainbow again in Revelations which is around God’s throne, and there we shall experience His mercy again.
Mercy. It, like the rainbow, is a gift from above that we often take for granted, and that is ours every day. But, yet it is a gift that we sparingly bestow on each other. Mercy…it is compassion — compassion for you and compassion for me, and compassion for each other.
The next time you see a rainbow, look up and look into the eyes of God. They are compassionate eyes. It makes me ask: What about my eyes? Are they compassionate?
The next day when I visited a friend at Ivy Hall and as I was leaving,I noticed the door at the end of the hall ajar. When I glanced inside, a hand waved at me. I was ready to open the door to go out to the elevator when I turned back to speak to the lady behind the hand — Jean McQueen. She smiled and asked what the weather was like outside. She then made this statement about the weather: “Whether or not you can feel it or see it, the weather is always with us.” God is like that, too. He’s there, whether we can see Him or feel Him.