Green

If you ask a toddler to do his best work on a page from his coloring book, using your favorite color, he will probably rejoice in finding the right crayon,scribble quickly until a substantial layer of waxy simplicity appears, ignore the lines with high energy, and present you with with art in one elementary shade...with joyful enthusiasm.

But I have learned that a grown-up interaction with the color green, for example, must be aware and opened up to include the huge variety of tints and hues understood through careful observation over time. For example, my children, all artists in their own right, would look at this photograph of the live oak in my back yard and be able to discuss more shades of green than I would see at first, due to their greater talent and extensive work in the discipline.

As a result of discussions like these, I have learned to throw away my crayon box view of "green", embracing the breathtaking wonder of God's immense world of green, some displays of which I will never even have the opportunity to view because of my inability to travel to the remotest parts of the earth in the short time we are all given. I am training myself, however, to concentrate on what is right in front of me, pondering the glory in little things.

I believe we come of age carrying spiritual crayon boxes, if you will. In them we store our easy perceptions of Our Maker, and use them to create two-dimensional representations of The Way Things Are. We do not choose to deeply regard design or its Designer because its supreme diversity demands that we change, and that is too complicated and too painful. But what a great Explainer he is through the Scriptures, and what a Healer he is in our hearts!

Think: If God delights in showing us the diversity of a simple color "green," how great is his joy in showing us all of Himself in all of the little things?

Meditate: "For this people's heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them."  Matthew 13:15