Vivid Technicolor Life

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
--Jesus of Nazareth, circa 30AD

When I was a kid, I loved to color in coloring books. For school you only had to have a box of eight or sixteen colors. Sixteen colors just didn't seem adequate. It didn't come close to capturing the  spectrum of possibilities a blank page presented. What if a sky was Slate or Periwinkle? What if a superhero had a Carrot-colored costume instead of the usual Orange? What I needed was one of those huge boxes with the crayon sharpener in the back. You know the one. It had metallic colors like Copper and Gold. It took two hands to lift and an hour to clean up if you dumped them out. If you had one of these bad boys on the shelf you were cool. People wanted to color at your house. You had options.

Kids get it. They want their pictures to be vibrant, vivid, vivacious. They want their picture to be noticed. By everyone. They ever met. Including that total stranger in the grocery store who desperately wants to pay for his milk and frozen waffles and go home.

We can learn something here. Do we, as adults, still want our pictures to get noticed? Don't we sometimes paint with a blander brush in the hope that no one will stop and look and maybe ask questions about our picture? Don't we limit our life to a box of eight crayons?

I think so. I think in this age of moral gray areas and religious blending, all the colors are starting to look alike. Spin the dial on your radio. Even the music starts to sound the same. Country sounds like rock sounds like jazz sounds like... You get the point. In art class, they taught me that when you mix two primary colors together, you get another color. If you mix all the colors together, you get a muddy brown that doesn't really look like any color at all. We're getting there.

I don't really want that. I don't want to be washed-out, muddy and inconspicuous. I want the big box of crayons. I want that vivid, technicolor life. Remember technicolor? When Dorothy stepped into Oz she saw a place painted in bright colors populated by equally, colorful characters. In the movie, Oz is in bold contrast to the drab Kansas (shown in black and white) from which she comes.

Our world isn't the paradise it was created to be anymore. There are things out there to be afraid of. But God doesn't really want us to be afraid. He really wants us to come to his house and draw a few pictures. After all, he does have the big box with all the colors and the sharpener in the back. And he'd like to share them with you.