Genesis 9:16
Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on earth.
On December 30th 2018 I got up early in the morning, left my hotel in Ollantaytambo with the rest of my tour group, and walked down to the train station to catch my train to Machu Picchu. It was a beautiful sunny morning and I was starting to feel a lot of regret for my decision to not take any shorts with me to Peru. All 34 of us got in line to board our train. I was near the back. Then, all of a sudden, our tour director, Sally, told all of us to get out of line and go wait in a little coffee shop next to the tracks.
Our train jostled away down the tracks… without us.
A ripple moved through our group of travelers as we slowly unfolded our tickets to try to find out what was wrong and if we had just tried to board the wrong train. Then a collective groan of disappointment went through the group as we all saw the date printed at the top. “Ollantaytambo to Machu Picchu December 30th 2019.”
Occasionally mistakes are going to be made. It takes me until March to get used to writing the new year on anything. Someone at my tour company’s corporate office had the exact opposite problem. It seems they had decided it was 2019 just a few weeks early.
Sally came bustling in and called over the mounting chatter of concern that a mistake had been made and that they were doing everything they could and calling in all of their contacts to get it fixed, we would still make it to Machu Picchu that afternoon. At that point in the trip I trusted Sally with my life. Sally knew everybody, Sally knew where the best restaurants were, and everyone hugged her when she arrived places, Sally was 100% on it and if she said she was going to fix the mix up with our tickets I believed her 100%. So, I handed over my ticket and set my bags down and waited for it to be fixed.
Maybe an hour later one of my companions’ phone buzzed. She pulled up the international messaging that connected our group. Sally had texted from the ticket counter, “Bad news, all of the trains to Machu Picchu are booked until January 3rd.”
I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. Sally said she was going to fix it. Early in the trip, on our first day in Cusco, we had come out of a tour of a cathedral to beautiful sunny weather when it had been hailing only an hour earlier. Sally pointed out an overlook that had “the best view of Cusco” and asked if we wanted to go there. When we all said yes, she said, “good because I already called the buses, they are waiting over here.” Sally knew how to fix things. If we weren’t taking a train to Machu Picchu, I was certain she already had something lined up to get us there. Honestly, I wish my faith in God was as strong as my faith in Sally was that day, if it was, I would never worry about anything ever again.
The phone buzzed again. “But I got us on a train at 11:30.”
The building sighed with relief.
We all picked up our bags and walked back to the hotel seeing as there was no point waiting around the train station for three hours.
Our new train rolled into Machu Picchu only four hours later than we expected. The beautiful, sunny morning had turned a deep pewter gray, almost blue from the water weighing down the clouds. One or two droplets splattered the pavement. We checked into our hotel and walked down to the bus station where sally told us to wait while she picked up our tickets.
A few drops of water turned to thousands, that’s the rainy season in Peru for you. Soon sheets of water poured out of the sky and I, along with 32 other twenty-somethings huddled against the walls and under overhangs in the alley by the bus station waiting and wondering if this was what we had to look forward to at Machu Picchu. We looked up at the darkening sky. Most of us had booked the trip months earlier and had been paying installments every month while gazing at that perfect postcard picture of Machu Picchu with llamas and bright sunshine. It looked like what we had all been daydreaming about would not be what we got, if we ever got up the hill at all.
“It will be fine,” I declared after forty-five minutes of watching the sky do its impression of a waterfall. “When it rains this hard it never rains for very long.” As if I know anything about the weather in Peru. Sure, it rains in Washington and I am used to it but knowing how rain works in the Pacific Northwest does not mean I know how rain works in the Cloud Forest of Peru. “It will probably rain for another half hour and by the time we get up there the clouds where break apart and we’ll have beautiful, sunny, rainbow weather.” The rain was not going to dampen my spirits even if it had already forced its way through my raincoat and started to dampen my sweater, jeans, and hair.
By the time we boarded the bus it seemed like I was wrong, the sky had turned a much lighter shade of grey and the rain no longer seemed like it was going to wash us away, but it was still raining. We climbed on the buses. A new cloud of disappointment gathering around us.
No. I removed my poncho, wadded it into the best folds I could and shoved it in my backpack. This was going to be a good afternoon if for no other reason than I willed it to be. I had come to far to be disappointed in one of the seven wonders of the world. The lost city of the Incas was going to be beautiful and I was going to get to see it. We were going to have rainbow weather.
We arrived at the overlook of Machu Picchu two hours before closing still being splattered with rain drops but we could see the citadel and the mountains. It was beautiful and stunning and everything the post cards promised. Lush green grass and trees surrounded by almost silver clouds and evening blues skies. Even more, it was empty. The thing about torrential downpours is even when they are at archeological sites and enjoying one of the seven wonders of the world and other once in a lifetime opportunities most people do not want to be out in them. It is a fact of human nature. Outside is actually awful so we have spent centuries perfecting inside. The citadel was almost completely empty of the 2000 tourists that come through the ruins on a daily basis. There was no need to wait in line to get our signature photos at the overlook or to contort into strange angles to get a picture of the ruins that weren’t packed with strangers. Then the sun came out and while I was standing there with my friends a full rainbow arced across the sky from Huayna Picchu across the valley. Rainbow weather. A few rain drops landed directly in my eyes.
Life is hard and the events that got me to Machu Picchu on December 30th 2018 were difficult to go through, heartbreak, chronic pain, depression,. It was also disappointing and a little nerve wracking to arrive at the train station and learn that our tickets were wrong. It is hard when you have a plan and an expectation of how things are going to work, and that plan gets dashed and delayed. My road to get to Machu Picchu that day was much like that. I’d had my heart broken and was just trying to find things to be excited about and ways to be the person I wanted to be. Then within weeks of booking the trip I had a cancer scare. I spent my whole spring, summer, and fall in and out of the doctor’s office being poked and having unpleasant things put in unpleasant places. Fortunately, my tests for cancer came back negative, the tumors in my uterus would eventually have to be removed but they wouldn’t kill me. Hard things, yes. Delays, yes. But I had to believe that they had a purpose, they were redirecting to something better.
If we had not have had our four-hour delay, we would have been arriving at Machu Picchu just as the rain started. We would have been soaked trying to press through crowds. Instead we stood at the top of the hill staring out at one of the wonders of the world framed by a rainbow. I do not know what I was being directed toward or away from with the life delays I came across in 2018, but God places rainbows in the sky to remind us that God remembers his covenants with us.
God reminded Noah that never again would the world be destroyed by water. That God would always remember that promise.
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