Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Behind the Rainbow (Somewhere Over the Rainbow)

Thanks for watching the video :) 

There is a bit of a story behind this piece. I have made it for Rae the mum of one of my closest friends. It came about because I wanted to be able to help out in small practical ways like cooking and cleaning but we have been stuck in another very long lockdown (over 2 months). Lockdown is challenging enough without having a broken collar bone. So being unable to visit or do anything practical I decided to make an arrangement of one of her favourite songs. I really hope I haven’t re-composed it too much. Many times, my imagination latches onto a musical idea and the piece takes on a whole new life of its own. It is very different from the original, but I hope it can still be enjoyed. 

Behind the Rainbow

The second layer to this piece is based on the imagery of the Rainbow. Rainbows have become a very loud symbol in today’s culture. Within their colours are found the ideals of love and freedom but they are mixed with and fuelled by decades of hatred and abuse. Today the symbol claims acceptance but I have seen too much blind extremism from both the progressive and conservative activists that at the end of the day is only producing more hurt. 

But, if you peel back the layers of time the rainbow takes on a much deeper and richer meaning. In ancient cultures, things were defined by their function whereas today things are mostly defined by their physicality. Today a chair is an object with 1 to 4 legs a bench and a back. To the ancients, it was something that you sit on. If a thing had no function it wasn’t spoken about or thought of. This means that while rainbows would have existed from the very first time it rained, they would not have been anything to those who saw them. That is until Genesis 9:13-17 when God decided to assign the rainbow to function as a symbol of his promise to never again seek to destroy or reshape the world through a large-scale flood. The rainbow was to be a sign of hope and security after experiencing the trauma of a mammoth flood. Yet to those who did not wish to follow God it would also have been a symbol of freedom. It was understood that the flood was sent because man was utterly wicked. We know from archeology that the ancient world was brutally savage. The safe boundaries of marriage weren’t followed and there was an abundance of murder, rape, cannibalism, and thousands of child sacrifices. God in his mercy had to end it. It is easy to look back and see a flood that wiped out an entire population as cruel but what if the alternative was worse.  What if there were no innocent children left in that population because they had all been burnt as living sacrifices. We can mock and look down on the people who practice this, but we today are not much different. Today we are our own gods. And if a child isn’t wanted, we sacrifice it for the sake of our comfort and lifestyle under the medically acceptable umbrella of abortion. 

Do You Know What it Means?

Sometimes when I see people draped in a rainbow flag screaming for their rights at the top of their lungs I wonder if they truly know what they are wearing and demanding. And do they realise that God has already given them what they are asking for? Which is the space and freedom to follow no one but themselves without his interference. It was spoken about in Romans 1:22-26 where it says that “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore, God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts, to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonourable passions.” 

The rainbow, however, is not unbridled permission to forever do as we please. A time is coming when this world and all that is a part of it will be utterly warn out. God gave us this world and our bodies to look after and instead we are destroying it. One need only look to global warming to see that our planet will not remain habitable forever. But there is hope. 

Promises

God has promised that there will be a new earth, untainted by the numerous evils of humans. He also promises us new bodies that our essence (spirit and soul) will inhabit. The ones we currently have are subject to decay and they have been hurt and abused by both ourselves and others. But what is God going to do with this new world? Anyone capable of rational thought will understand that if he gave it back to us, we would simply destroy it again. One need only look to what happened after the flood in Genesis 10 to see how quickly we can lose our moral compass. Or even the recent lockdowns that can be sparked by just one person doing the wrong thing. We have had our turn to do it our way and soon it will be God’s turn. 

God however is full of grace and mercy, and still wants us to share his new world with him. But how can he trust us? How can he possibly forgive us for destroying an unfathomably beautiful and complex world? As an individual we may not think we have done much to create badness in the world but is that really true? Isn’t telling a white lie to our boss (I got stuck in traffic when we really overslept) just injecting another flavour of badness into the world. Going just a few km over the speed limit is okay? Downloading music isn’t really stealing? The Bible teaches that ‘none is righteous no not one’ (Romans 3:10). 

In order for us to share in God’s new beautiful and perfect world, he would need to forgive us. I think today forgiveness is not something we understand. We have inherited an ugly caricature that mocks and scorns what true forgiveness is. We hear shallow phrases like ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘let it go’. The problem with these sentiments is that they lack justice and retribution. 

When Forgiveness Isn’t Shallow

Imagine you are driving your newborn baby home from the hospital and you are hit by another car that was speeding and whose driver was drunk and high. They survive. You survive but your child does not. It would be utterly wrong and completely absurd for you to let that person walk away because you had simply decided to forgive them. It wouldn’t be fair. Their selfish and thoughtless actions who broke rules that were designed to keep people safe cost your child their entire life. It only seems fair and right and just that the person pays for it by spending the rest of their own lives in jail. How do you feel once the person is in jail and paying for their crime? Do you genuinely feel like forgiving them? I know I wouldn’t. I would still be mad, angry, and hurt. I would still want to yell and scream and cry that it isn’t fair. If they did ever get out of prison would you trust them? What if they got back behind the wheel? 

Yet somehow we expect God to let us off the hook and to not make us pay for all the hurt and wrong that we have caused in and to a world that He created. We expect God to merely turn a blind eye and we demand to be able to go scot-free without even the remotest hint of the consequences for our actions. We think that we have done nothing to God. But that is like the driver who killed your baby claiming to have done nothing to you. Hurting someone you care deeply about is the same as hurting you. Hurting someone or even something God care’s deeply about is the same as hurting God. And no one can go their entire lives without ever hurting someone or causing zero harm to this planet. 

What if a Total Stranger Saved Your Life?

Let’s imagine another scenario. This time you are an innocent bystander. Walking along, headphones in, minding your own business. There is a branch hanging precariously from a tree and a stranger is watching as you get closer and closer to the exact place the branch will fall. As you arrive at the place your phone rings, so you stop to answer it. The wind starts blowing but you are oblivious to the danger. Suddenly out of nowhere someone pushes you violently forward just as the branch falls. You are shaken but alive. The stranger is where you were except the branch has fallen and there is no way possible they could have survived. What are you going to do? Can you just keep walking forgetting what someone who you don’t even know, has sacrificed so that you can live? How do you feel? 

I personally would feel a complex cacophony of emotions. I would be overwhelmed, indebted, ashamed, embarrassed, loved, confused. I would feel like I would need to honour that person with my life as well as honour their wishes and that I would need to remember them and their sacrifice every moment of my life. I would be grateful and sad because I know I could never live up to them. I would feel special. If I did not know them I would feel the need to get to know them and the sort of person they were. Even if I didn’t agree with everything they said/taught I would still have a profound respect for them. I would also tell lots of people about them. And I’d need help so I could sustain this over all the years of my life. And I would write music for them. This is just my personal response but how would you respond? 

A Rough Picture

These two pictures start to paint a rough picture of what Jesus has done for us. The falling branch is God’s judgment. Which will and is coming. Whether we are oblivious to it or not we will still experience it. We deserve to experience it. I think deep down everybody (expects those with narcissistic, sociopathic, or psychopathic conditions) knows they aren’t a good enough person even though we desperately want to believe that they are. We can easily justify our actions by stating that we are not as bad as Hitler. But a lie is a lie, stealing is stealing. Reality is brutal and hard. 

Then there is the random stranger who pushed us out of the way of the falling branch. This is Jesus. Jesus sees and knows. He understands that not everything is completely our fault more than we ourselves do. He knows we were raised by hurting parents who didn’t know how to treat us right. He knows how our environment has shaped and molded us. He knows how we are both innocent and guilty. And he pushes us out of the way. He took the punishment that was rightly ours by dying on a cross in our place. How are you going to respond? 

What Are You Going to Do?

The rainbow is a promise that life after the storm is coming. God loves us too much to simply leave us or humanity for all eternity in this messy form of life that we currently have. The rainbow is a promise not of the freedom to choose your gender identity or follow whatever sexual orientation you may desire but of true life and freedom from even the desire to do anything that could be wrong. It is a promise that through God’s plan and God’s way we will live to reach our full potential and be everything that we were made to be.  

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4 Comments

  1. I love it. I REALLY like what you did with this interpretation of the song.

    I actually stumbled onto your site doing some research for a blog post I was writing about “good, bad and totally useless wind instrument reviews.” (Yours is one of two reviews I listed as a GOOD review, by the way.)

    https://windimprov.com/better-gear/good-bad-instrument-reviews/

    But back to the song, as this is the spot where I’m writing the comment. I listened to it once, and thought “interesting. Kind of raw in spots. Not in a bad way, but in an interesting way.”

    But after I read what you said about the rainbow in your post here, I listened again, picturing that whole “after the flood” scenario, pondering them coming out of the ark, not just seeing a rainbow but seeing it in the context of the devastation of the world, of the cost of sin, of the Father’s heart looking for a chance to redeem, and how many rejected Him.

    When I listened to the song with this picture in mind, it took on a different life. It’s wonderful and an inspiring piece of art.

    I actually put a listing for you (and particularly for this song) on a web page on another site I have. My vision is to have a place of sorts to make instrumental musicians aware of each other.

    https://worshipwinds.com/showcase/techie-flutist/

    Love the song, Emma. And I truly appreciate your vulnerability about your spiritual journey. I’m sure God is very pleased with you!

    I listened to it twice, actually.

    1. 🥰 🙏🏻 thank you so, so much. You have absolutely made my day. I checked out your website! What a brilliant idea to connect instrumental musicians especially with technology being so amazing. It means we can collaborate on projects without even needing to be in the same country.

      1. I never even thought of that! Maybe I should (if I can get the time) create some kind of resource page on there so that if any of the Christian Musicians out there that come across the site would like to do it, they could share some information for others to contact them. Keep up the good work young lady. I love your stuff and love your heart for the Lord.

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Meet the Author

The Techie Flutist Composer

Composer, Flautist, Educator, Christian, Thinker.