After the laziest, least-researched Google search of all time, I found what I was looking for on Indiana Public Media and Click Orlando: the reason why the colors of the earth appear more vibrant after rainfall. Long story short, in layman’s terms because I need them, water filling the nooks and crannies of things enables light to bounce off the surface of wet things more times than the surfaces of dry things, and the remnant of clouds after a storm means more particles present in the air to “act as reflectors of light.” Extra water means more reflection of light, and more reflection of light means our eyes behold more glorious colors around us.1
There’s an old cliche amongst creatives that an artist has only to go into nature to get divinely inspired, and while I once hiked a mountain and then, in a great state of contrariness, wrote a poem called “I Went into Nature and Felt No Closer to God,” I usually find that the cliche circulates for a reason. You’d need faith considerably larger than the size of a mustard seed to believe all this neatly, perfectly ordered universe came from, like, a giant fireball eruption or something, and I think even the souls of the most hardened atheists betray them just a little bit when beholding the works of His hands (there’s a reason at least half of world scientists believe in God or, at the very least, are not convinced a higher power doesn’t exist—which is not to say that they are therefore New Creationists, but that the idea of a great big Something Bigger does not seem implausible to them).
It’s hard to gaze at the solar eclipse—or traipse about in a field of fireflies like my husband and I did last night—without feeling a sense of awe and even glorious insignificance. My husband caught a firefly (and set it free later, don’t worry), and its light was powerful enough to create a miniature sunburst in his cupped hands. I tried to record a video of the fireflies dancing around among the trees and bushes, but modern technology couldn’t capture it.
When I turned, I saw the makings of a thunderstorm brewing behind the clouds, and in my mind, I pictured a cosmic battle raging beyond the human eye. I hadn’t even known there were that many clouds in the sky until the lightning illuminated them all. I put my phone away. Human hands can render it better, imitating splendor like a firefly imitates lightning. I stood there, unbothered by 77% humidity, thinking about how many years it’d been since I’d last seen fireflies, and how they’re called “lightning bugs” where I come from, and how, at the end of it all, God didn’t defend Himself to Job.2
Job made all those accusations of God being unfair and not caring and even falling asleep while creation labored on, and when God shows up, He doesn’t defend Himself like humans try to defend Him in skeptical college classrooms or progressive creative writing conferences or the time when I was just trying to get a cup of coffee from the office at work and walked into the room right when a coworker was saying, “religion and politics have one thing in common: they’re both useless.”
God shows up. He highlights the universe’s wonders, tells Job what he doesn’t know about nature, and reminisces on laying the foundations of the earth—all this in a voice from the eye of a storm. I can’t imagine the impact this would have on a human soul, considering the children of God couldn’t even look at a man after he had spoken to God because his face was too bright and radiant, but Job shows us what can happen: he repents of his accusations and makes sacrifices to God, acknowledging his wrongness even though God never even actually rebutted Job’s arguments. All God had to do was talk about His creation of the universe.
People have no excuse for denying God because we know, in the deepest depths of our hearts, that He exists. And, while I absolutely and 100% resolutely believe there is value in studying apologetics and the alignment of faith and science so as to answer the questions of people whose hearts have become too deadened to admit to the existence of God as expressed through the existence of nature, and while I have written about the value of taking our questions and doubts to God whenever we encounter them, sometimes we need to take walk among fireflies beneath a lightning-clad sky to realize that God is God, and He doesn’t need to prove Himself any more than He already has.
There’s probably a metaphor in there about how life seems more full of, well, life after a storm, and it could probably go on teenage Rachel’s Facebook bio as an #inspiringthought.
This idea is not my own. I’ve been pondering it since I first encountered it in Philip Yancey’s Disappointment with God. For those unfamiliar with the story of Job, in one of the greatest dramas in human history, a man suffers immeasurable loss and basically accuses God of not being good. God finally answers Job’s accusations by showing him His majesty.