I have now lived on this earth, this stunningly beautiful and challenging planet, for 72 years.
I arrived here as World War II was getting underway, and right in the thick of it too.
My parents were on their way from the USA to serve as medical missionaries in India.
They took the last civilian ship allowed across the Pacific, because of the spread of the war.
My mother was great with child.  That would be me.  
The ship sailed from San Francisco and docked in Rangoon.  My mother went into labor two weeks prematurely, and they had to race her up the river that ran from the harbor into the city in a sampan.  She gave birth to me at Dufferin Hospital.  A few days later, all ex-patriates were warned to flee the city, because of an imminent Japanese attack.  
My parents managed to secure passage on a boat sailing across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta.
There was a big storm but they had to leave.  My mother gets motion sickness easily.
Can you imagine how tough it was for her to make this passage under such duress with a new premature baby in arms?  
The made it to Calcutta and from there took trains( with me in a little basket: I still have a picture of myself in it)   all the way across India to Karachi in what is now Pakistan.  
Shortly after arriving there,  they were notified by telegram that my mother's father, in his mid-fifties, had been killed in a car crash.  Shortly after that, Pearl Harbor happened, and they were notified that my mother's brother had enlisted in the Navy as the USA joined the war.
During the first two years of my life, my mother almost died of hepatitis.  My father also got very sick.  And before I was five I almost died of rheumatic fever.  

I called my mom, who is now 101, to thank her for her hard labor in giving me birth and all she underwent to care for me in very tough circumstances.  She just laughed. It must be the perspective she has at her advanced age!

So.  I am still here.  And so are all of you who are reading this.  And I bet you have had what my mom describes as "close calls" too.   Why was I spared to go on living?  Why were you?
My father told me, when I was in high school and we were having a "heart to heart" talk
that he thought God spared my life because there were things God wanted me to do and be
in service to the world.   
What do you think?   
To me the rainbow is a beautiful symbol of the chances we all get, over and over again, to 
make a fresh start, to try to do better,  to create anew.  More about that in my next blog.