What Color the Thunder?

"What color the thunder?" is the question that came to mind one night last week just as I was dropping off to sleep. Thinking it might turn out to be important, I quickly jotted it down on the pad I keep next to my bed so I wouldn’t forget it. Forget it? How could I forget it? Those words have been bugging me ever since as I continue trying to apply some kind of reason to them.

It couldn’t be a painting, I reasoned. Thunder has no color. It’s a sound.... often a sound heard far off in the distance announcing a coming storm to a sunny blue sky with fluffy white clouds. No, I can’t paint the thunder until it brings the storm. Even then I’d only be able to paint the storm, not the thunder.

If not a painting, I wondered if perhaps it was meant to become a poem. I then tried, valiantly, to put all that simple phrase conjured up in my mind into poetic form....and failed.

Sharing my frustration with a friend, I asked for her insight. "Why," I entreated, "does this stay in my mind and what am I supposed to do with it?"

"Don’t worry," she assured me, "It will bubble up from inside you one way or another. Be patient."

And while it’s "bubbling up", as she says, I find myself watching fluffy white clouds move across an ultramarine sky while listening to the distant thunder. While I watch and listen, I ask others the question, "What color the thunder?" I get a color response...usually gray (payne’s gray from the artists), black or purple... but no one has yet asked me, "What thunder?"

The thunder I hear is not only one sound, but many which come together to make it seem as one. Like musical instruments joining together one at a time until, together, they build to a single, loud, crashing crescendo.

The sounds I hear in the thunder are the cries of the persecuted. I can see the crimson red of martyrs’ blood. I can hear the wailing of the children as they watch their parents being slain...and of the parents as they see their children beheaded. What color are screams of anguish? I hear the sounds of hatred, envy and judgment. I hear the sounds of verbal and physical cruelty...of complete disregard for others. I hear evil in the form of negativity trying to creep unnoticed into our lives, affecting our love and acceptance of one another. What colors would these sounds be?

Maybe the thunder isn’t so distant as we’d like to think. Maybe the thunder just isn’t as loud as we think it should be....yet. Maybe we can shut it out and pretend it isn’t there. Maybe.

Every day I face the choice of succumbing to the storms...giving in to "popular opinion".... or standing firm in my faith, relying solely on my God and His promises while seeing the colors of thunder.