Consider the Rainbow: Free Printable Devotion and resources for unit study

A few days ago, I started reading something on my sister’s Facebook feed, and I was incredibly blessed by her words. So blessed, that I immediately started thinking about how I could share the precious truths from her words with my children.

And once I started down that path, it naturally led to a study of rainbows, especially from God’s perspective.

Then I started thinking that perhaps you would be blessed to share this concept with your children as well.

With her permission, I am including the original text here for you to share with your family, or perhaps even your Sunday school class or small group. I’ve also included links to fun ways to take this devotional and make it the foundation of a more complete study of the rainbow. Download your free printable of this devotion here. The free printable includes a beautiful rainbow image to share with your students, a copy of the devotion, and a copy of the story of the rainbow from the Bible.

“Several years ago while teaching a unit on light in Physics, traveling overseas, and reading Genesis during the same time frame, I discovered what I believe to be a very cool truth that we often miss. It all started after I had taught the unit on rainbows. Then I was in an airplane early in the morning when the sun was just coming over the horizon on the Atlantic Ocean. The entire sky went from dark as night to purple to indigo to green, yellow, orange, red…the earth seemed to be wrapped for a few moments before dawn in a giant rainbow. Startling and beautiful.
Then it hit me, the conditions for humans to see rainbows require the sun to be behind you, the storm to be past you, and the angle of the sun to be around 40 degrees with the horizon. Therefore, we mostly see rainbows in the evening after storms and occasionally in the morning with a surprise shower.
But I can make a rainbow in my back yard with a hose and apparently the atmosphere makes a rainbow every morning with the humidity in the air.
Could it be that there is always a rainbow? I only see them twice maybe three times a year but over the years I have come to believe that there is always a rainbow with every single drop of rain and water in the air. I am just usually not in the right place at the right angle to see it.
But someone I know is everywhere, all the time. He must be able to always see the rainbow.
Then it hit me anew. Who is the rainbow for anyway? Most of us are wrong in our memory. Go ahead and check it out in Genesis 9:14-15. I bet you will be surprised. The rainbow is not to remind us of God’s promise to never flood the earth again. The rainbow appears to remind HIM!
And to think that he sees that early morning rainbow around the horizon every morning, not just the ones that I happen to see when in an airplane at sunrise. As if he would ever forget his promises, he puts a constant reminder around the earth, with every sunrise in humid skies, with every raindrop in every storm. He never stops remembering his promise.
That gives me much peace and hope and makes me a little overly excited every time I get to participate in seeing the rainbow with Him.” by Lynn Tolley