It’s that ‘most colorful time of the year’ again. Burnished leaves swirl through the breezy autumn air and land to dry as a crunchy, richly-hued carpet of red and gold. The deep green of our western Washington hillsides become flecked with warmer shades of gingery auburns and chocolaty browns. And in the crisp, made-for-mittens mornings, bright yellow school buses lurch in starts and stops down our streets and avenues. I love fall!
As a kid, autumn meant nervous anticipation about a new school year. What unfamiliar things would I be learning? Would I make good friends in my classroom? Would I like my teacher (and would he or she like me)? But it was great fun to choose a new lunch box and pick up a few school supplies. There’s just something about a brand new box of crayons and a posy of freshly sharpened pencils that still makes me smile. (Maybe it’s the always-a-student in me but I adore the smell of pencil shavings. You too?)
Even then, I loved books and anything to do with words. And when our teacher read to us each day?? That was heaven! Probably my second-favorite subject was art and I especially loved to paint.
That long, thin, rectangular box filled with eight shades of watercolors held a mysterious gallery of possibilities. We’d dip the stubby black bristles of our red plastic paintbrushes into water-filled paper cups and go at our construction paper canvases with the passion of little would-be van Goghs! Ah, the vast potential of spreadable pigment!
I remember looking eagerly at those little circular pots of vibrant color, all lined up in a row, just waiting for my water-soaked brush to start the magic. I was often disappointed, however, when the picture in my head didn’t quite match the one that showed up on the art paper. While the colors in the box were lively, those on my page were sometimes drab. But there were reasons for that unwanted outcome.
When young children are learning to watercolor, they often use a wide swath of strokes and one crude brush for painting the whole page. And they haven’t yet learned to properly clean the brush between colors—so everything runs together and gets murky and muddied.
It takes a little more experience and maturity to learn how to paint with dexterity and a fine hand, to keep this from running onto (and ruining) that. To create a beautiful painting, colors need to go where they belong—yes, there can be some blending, but when all the colors are mixed together, everything becomes a drab, brownish-gray, the picture makes no sense, and the intent of the painter is lost. The canvas goes dark.
I’ve decided that, as a lifelong learner, every day is back-to-school day and we can learn a lot from a first-grader’s art project. Those same watercolor principles hold true in everyday life. Especially when the world as we know it goes dark—a painful struggle in our marriage, a setback at work or job loss, a health crisis, a messy relational challenge, the loss of a dream—it’s so easy to let those dark colors bleed over into everything else. Soon the whole canvas of our being—even the pure, beautiful shades of joyful things, the many ways we are so blessed—takes on the bleak hues of worry, anger, or discontent.
It takes spiritual and emotional dexterity to say “This is hard—it hurts, but it’s only one part of the bigger picture of my life.
That shouldn’t be ruined by this.”
I’m learning I can paint my pain with vivid, bold colors (it’s no use denying our wounds), while not letting those shades bleed into everything else on the canvas of my otherwise-blessed life.
And the best way I’ve found to do that is to dip my brush often into the waters of prayer and gratitude. Prayer helps me clean the paint of yesterday’s pain from the brush of experience I must use again today. Gratitude shows me the bright shades of joy I might otherwise miss.
I think Philippians 4:6 & 7 says it best: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand.” (New Living Translation)
Prayer. Gratitude. Peace. Now those are the colors to create a masterpiece, even in a world gone dark.
You’re not done painting, my friend, and this world is waiting to see the beauty in your life that comes after the darkness. Just remember to clean your brush.
{If I can pray for you to find new color in a world gone dark, please just respond with ‘yes’ below — it would be my privilege.}
Would you like to have new posts delivered to your email?
Want to share this post with others? It’s easy—click on one of the “share” buttons below.
Have some thoughts about what you’ve just read? Your comments are most welcome–use the comment box below!