It had been a long day of driving—all the way from Abbotsford to Nelson, on the first leg of our trip to Alberta in early July. We finally pulled into our lakeside campsite at Kokanee Creek Provincial Park at suppertime, and were greeted by a cloud of mosquitoes and the rumbling of a thunderstorm in the distance.

While my husband got to work setting up the tents, I pulled out the camp stove to start making supper—just as it started to rain. Thankfully it didn’t last long, but in the meantime our tent and all of the dishes and food had gotten thoroughly soaked. I was grumpily heading to the van to look for the dry dish towels when our girls spotted the beginnings of a rainbow through the trees, and begged me to come down to the beach with my camera to take a picture.

We came out of the trees onto the open sand, and collectively gasped in awe. I grew up in Alberta, where a rainbow following an early evening thunderstorm was fairly common. But this was truly spectacular—a double rainbow arching over the lake and fully visible from end to end, disappearing into the lake on either side.

That was a real “rainbow” moment that I will treasure from this summer. But there were so many more…my oldest daughter giggling as we went over the rapids in a tube on the Puntledge River; the look of pure joy on my little nephew’s face as he turned the ceiling fan off and on in our suite in Jasper; the moment when our giant sandcastle on Miracle Beach finally succumbed to the waves; my middle daughter’s first solo kayak trip across Pyramid Lake; and my dishevelled youngest daughter looking out over the ocean after crawling out of her tent in the bright morning sunlight…to name just a few.

Summer may be over, but one of the wonderful things about being a middle school teacher is that those moments to treasure show up all year at school too, in the joy of “getting” an algebra problem, watching students worship God as part of a praise team in chapel, or watching the beginnings of a new friendship develop between students in our classes. 

There are a lot of things that I will miss about summer, but I’m glad that God still puts rainbows in my path every day.