Early this morning, I read a wrap-up story about the NCAA Football Championship. I’m not going to write about the game. You can read about that anywhere. However, I was pulling for the Louisiana State University Tigers to win over the Clemson Tigers. A duel of Tigers. As it turns out, LSU won in a decisive victory, 42-25.
But in all of this, I do have to mention a guy named Joe Burrow. For those of you who don’t follow sports, Burrow is the quarterback for LSU. He won the Heisman Trophy this year. That distinction means he is the best player in all the land of college football. You would most likely agree if you ever watched him play. Joe Burrow is super duper good, and amazingly calm, cool, and collected in every gridiron situation. Besides all of that, he seems really nice.
Back in December, he accepted the trophy for the Heisman. The winner is then expected to say a few words about winning the award. He got teared up as he spoke, and this is what he said:
“Coming from southeast Ohio, it’s a very impoverished area,” the 23-year-old Burrow said on the stage in New York, wiping away tears after he won the award. “The poverty rate is almost two times the national average, and there’s so many people there that don’t have a lot. “I’m up here for all those kids in Athens and in Athens County that go home to not a lot of food on the table, hungry after school.” he added, telling those kids, “and you guys can be up here, too.”
His little impromptu speech sparked an unexpected fundraiser that left the Athens County Food Pantry with nearly $435,000 in donations by the next morning. As you can see, this young man has a heart. He will be the number one draft pick in the NFL. Never before have I wished so hard for someone to make it good once they get to the NFL.
Anyway, I got a little off track with all of this. Back to this morning’s article about the game. And my point. I was reading about it in the USA Today. At the bottom of the article was an advertisement. For Skittles.
The little video showed a giraffe taking a few bites from multi-colored cloud. The scene panned out, and there was some Rastafarian guy, sitting on a ladder by the giraffe, milking her. I guess it is a her. They were on a beach, of all places. So the guy is milking the giraffe, and guess what’s she’s giving. Skittles. Yep. They are pouring out of her, into a galvanized bucket below. He reaches down and flips on his boom box which starts playing Jamaican music. Then, he grabs a handful of skittles from the bucket, eats them, and laughs.
An announcers voice pipes in.
Discover the Rainbow.
Taste the Rainbow.
The ad itself, with the guy, and the giraffe, and the whole scene is ridiculous and bit dozy if you ask me. However, the message at the end is pretty darn good.
Discover the rainbow. Taste the rainbow.
You know, rainbows are one of those magical things about our scientific world. Things have to be just right for them to happen. You are lucky to see one. Rainbows can be seen when light passes through raindrops. It is really an optical illusion created by the refraction and reflection of light. So, in short, when sunlight passes through raindrops, the light bends, or refracts, as it enters the droplet. But then. Then, it reflects off the inside of the raindrop. This happens because the water is more dense than the air that surrounds it.
And the magic continues when the light exits the droplet. It separates into wavelengths. And that’s what makes the different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The colors bend at a different angles. Simply put.
It is a phenomenon. Magic. We are seeing something that isn’t really there. But it is. But you can’t touch it, or smell it, or taste it.
Or can you?
Joe Burrow has been dipping into rainbows. With a lot of hard work, and natural born talent. But he has. He’s given rainbows to others, too, using his gifts.
We all can’t be Heisman Trophy winning football players, and National Champions. But we can be our own people, with our goodness, our talents, our gifts to give the world. There are no small ways in this. Every bit of goodness is large to this world.
All of our goodness makes colorful magic.
We can discover the rainbow. We can taste the rainbow.
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“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
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“A wonderful gift may not be wrapped as you expect.”
― Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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“Being gifted doesn’t mean you’ve been given something. It means, you have something to give.”
― pleasefindthis
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