What is At The Rainbow?

Quite simply, it is the name for our house. It is also the name I changed my blogsite to once we named our house (previously I was BeSwiftBePrecise, though that was an at wordpress url). But always, and even more so now, it is an idea.

What idea? Of that I am not as clear about as I should be. But this blog post is where I am going to try to explain.

The choosing of the name came slowly. Since long before I became an adult I had wanted to have a house with a name. Not every house is given a name, but a few are. you are familiar with Mount Vernon, Monticello, The Hermitage, and there are a few houses in most every community that are known by a name, whether formal or informal (and I mean more than “The
Old Graham Place” and things like that.

When I was 16 my father built a circular house based on a US Forestry plan, and I always thought it should have a name, more than being called, “the round house on Brown Hollow Road”. But to my knowledge it never got one.

Several years after moving into our current house I started on the idea of trying to choose a name for it. Our first house had been blue, and our second house was blue (due to the new siding we put on both), and we got to calling our first house “The Little Blue House”, with echos of “Bear in the Big Blue House”, and less often to referring to our current one as “The Big Blue House.” But it wasn’t really a name.

And then I picked up the 5 gallons of red safety pavement paint for $5 at the Habitat Restore. I used it to delineate boundaries on our driveway. When that was gone, I noticed Home Depot sold six colors of safety paint — Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Black. I picked up the first five — not black — and painted a rainbow strip down the center of our driveway. Then I created a safety wall of spaced bricks with each layer being a different one of the five rainbow colors. The rainbow theme had begun.

Now I knew what to name the house — something rainbow — but NOT over the rainbow. After playing with words a few times, I decided we were to be At The Rainbow.

But what does it mean to be At The Rainbow?

The rainbow has meant many things through the ages, and in the current age it is most frequently associated with a certain social movement. One of the reasons we use our five color rainbow — Red Orange Yellow Green Blue — is to distinguish ourselves from that movement (and of course, those were the colors available to us from Home Depot). While having no animosity toward that social movement, we intend At The Rainbow to harken back further in time, to Genesis 9:13 and the first rainbow in the heavens, given as a promise of God to mankind and the earth.

We did not choose to name the house to make a challenging statement to the world around us, we just wanted a name with meaning. But it seems At The Rainbow is becoming more than just a house whether we would will it or not.

Genesis 9:13 comes at a watershed moment in history, a dividing line between an old and a new world, It marks a place of division and a place of restoration. There is no going back to the old world, and the new world is young and fresh and open before Noah and his family.

At The Rainbow came to be during the Covidiocy, a definite dividing line in the history of our nation and the world. As much as many would like, we can not go back to that old world, to the way things were. It also divided many people from each other. The residents of At The Rainbow have also found themselves divided from people in ways unexpected.

Yet we have also reached out to people with the light of the rainbow. It is the Light of God, divided into the rainbow of His diversity, calling each to the unity of His full light.

After Noah and his family left the Ark, it didn’t take many generations for their descendants to already forget the gift of the rescue God had provided, and to leave the promise of the Rainbow behind. In hearkening back to Genesis 9:13 At The Rainbow seeks not to reverse the course of history, but to call people to return to the hope and promise that God gave, and that He has since completed in His Son, living in the world, yet also within the light of safety and hope, symbolized by the rainbow.
As is the saying, we are in the world, but we are not of the world. At The Rainbow is a place that seeks to embody this concept. And anywhere in the world where His will is made known is this way, is in one way At The Rainbow, drinking the Light of God from the rainbow and finding it Life to the World.