Somewhere Over the Fogbow

            I had something really cool happen last week.  I was on my way back from a Lions club meeting in Onida.  It was about ten after eight in the morning.  I looked over to my left, and for the very first time in my life, I saw a fogbow.

            Have you ever seen one?  Have you ever even heard of one?  I hadn’t.  It’s the same size and shape as a rainbow, but instead of being multicolored, it’s uniformly greyish-white.  And in its own way, it’s beautiful.

            I looked it up after I got back to the office, and it’s a real thing.  A fogbow sometimes comes after fog, just as a rainbow sometimes comes after rain.  The reason it’s all greyish-white, rather than multicolored, is that the water droplets that form fog are smaller than raindrops.  Therefore, they don’t act as a prism and separate the colors the way raindrops do.  The fogbow is also sometimes called a white rainbow.

            Isn’t that cool?  I’m fifty-seven years old, and I saw something in nature I’ve never seen before.  And I did not have to go half-way around the world to see it.  All I had to do was look to my left.

            I think that shows a couple of things.  One is that it shows, once again, the incredible glory and variety of God’s creation.  God has created so many different kinds of beauty in the world.  It may literally be an infinite variety of beauty, because God is infinite.  God would not have had to do that.  God could’ve created a perfectly functional world without all the beauty as it has.  God created this beauty, I think, for two reasons:  because God enjoyed creating it and because God wants us to enjoy seeing it.

            But the second thing it shows is that, to see the beauty of God’s creation, we have to pay attention.  We have to keep our eyes open.  I’ve mentioned this fogbow to several people, and none of them saw it.  It was just coincidence that I saw it.  If I hadn’t been driving in the country at that particular time, and if I hadn’t looked to my left at just the right moment, I never would’ve seen it, either.

            It makes me wonder.  How many beautiful things in God’s creation have I missed, simply because I was not paying attention?  And how much beauty is all around me every day that I don’t see, simply because I was not looking for it?

            It’s a lesson for us, I think.  We all have stuff to do every day, and we need to pay attention to it to do it.  But we also need to look around once in a while.  We need to stop what we’re doing and just take a look at what’s around us.  God just might have something really beautiful for us to see.