The Covenant of Life

You hear it a lot this time of year, "I wish we got to have a white Christmas." I have said this myself and yet now I wonder what the significance of a white Christmas would be.
I come from a very small extended family and we spent the day at my Aunt and Uncle's house in Irmo, SC. We had made several comments about the strange weather throughout the day. It was cloudy then sunny, hot then windy, rainy then clear. As we walked to the car to leave around 5, I looked back and there it was, the most beautiful rainbow I have ever seen. It started as just one side then grew from end to end leaving no color unaccounted for as if it had been waiting for us to come outside to show itself fully. As if that wasn't enough, within minutes there was another coming alive right above the first.
In Genesis 9, right after the largest human massacre the world has ever known, God makes a covenant with Noah. He says, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and every living creature on earth for all generations to come. I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant and never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood."
How appropriate, on the day we use to celebrate LIFE coming to earth, is the sign of a rainbow, the promise that never again will all life be "cut off" by death? I haven't seen a rainbow in a long time. They are as rare to me as the sunrise (although the sun rises everyday) Like the unmatchable beauty of the discrete sunrise, I believe that rainbows are also a privileged glimpse into the presence of God as life in the world. Something happened today as I stood outside and watched the half rainbow grow into a whole rainbow then become two rainbows on Christmas day, something with much more significance than a white Christmas.