March 22, 2026

     This week we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, at least some of us did. I put a green hat on as I was leaving the house just so that I would not be pinched by a leprechaun. I have never seen one of these little men with an Irish brogue but when I was young I was sure I could find one. I knew that leprechaun’s gold could be found at the end of the rainbow. I know now that you can’t get to the end of the rainbow because the way they are formed means that they will move as you do. As a child of course, I had not learned this and was convinced on more than one occasion that the rainbow was touching the ground in the woods at the back of my grandparent’s farm. Knowing this I set out various times across the fields toward the forest to claim my gold.
     Of course, I never did get to the end of the rainbow because you can’t do it, (although I like to think that if you could there would be a leprechaun guarding his treasure). This myth about the gold works very well because you can’t find the end of the rainbow and therefore can never disprove the myth.
There is another myth often circulated in our time, however unlike the pot of gold no one will think you are crazy for believing it. Charles Darwin in 1859 wrote the book Origin of Species in it he proposed that all living organisms had evolved from a common ancestor through a process called natural selection. If his theory was true, one should be able to find in fossilized form transitional creatures which form a chain from one species to the next. In Darwin’s time he knew this was not the case. “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?” (Darwin, Origin of Species). (You have probably heard these intermediate links called “missing links”) He explained this by saying that the fossil record was partial and hoped that as further discoveries were made his theory would be vindicated. In other words, if we could just find the end of the rainbow then we would be sure that evolution is true. It has been 150 years and yet we still call them “missing links”. Harvard palaeontologist Steven Jay Gould has confessed that “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils” (Gould, Evolution’s Erratic Pace).
     So, evolutionists can continue searching and hoping that they will find the end of the rainbow but how long do you keep up such an endeavour? As I grew up, I learned better and stopped trying to find the pot of gold because I knew it was not real.
    Would it not make more sense to forget the pot of gold and seek a treasure that is real? For the Christian seeking eternal life there is someone who’s been to the end of the rainbow and proved that the treasure is there. Jesus died and rose again demonstrating that the offer he makes is real and that hope in him is not misplaced.
     I hope you had  a good St. Patrick’s Day, but don’t bank on finding a pot of gold. Instead seek the Lord while he may be found.

~ Kevin Cleary