Outside the Lines

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I’m lousy and not very creative at coloring, at least to my first grade teacher Ms. Flegal.“Stay in the shapes, Heidi!” I’d hear roared from the teacher.

“You’re coloring outside the lines again, Heidi.” It would continue year after year until the passion to color and to create art almost diminished itself completely.

I tried to convince the ‘older’ more mature me that it was okay to color outside the lines. I told her it was okay to use every inch of space on my paper and fill it all with whatever color she fancied.

The ‘older’ more mature me didn’t buy into it. She just put the crayons away and said she didn’t like to color. When others wanted to color she would convince them to go outside and ride bikes or she’d just doodle with a pencil where the ability to stay inside lines wasn’t as important.

In due course the desire to color went away.

One day the girl, now a woman, realized she had forgotten what the colors looked like. She forgot what they felt like as they left their imprint on the paper. She forgot the smell of the crayons as they were rubbed hard and fast against the page. She had lost her sense of color.

The woman knew that to regain her sense of color she would have to leave the security she had grown to trust. The house that surrounded her and the safety of her unnaturally white and black, two-dimensional world had actually been shadowing her all these years. She had become trapped without color and had almost forgotten to miss it.

The woman searched and searched as the seed to remember the color grew within her. She grabbed old boxes from storage and dumped them out in her quest. Finally among the last of the boxes, out onto her perfectly white-washed carpet, fell forty-eight individual, vibrant, intoxicating crayons of many colors.

The color began to fill her house. She saw them with new eyes. She saw them in all their beauty. She cried tears of yellow as the sun touched her skin. She looked down to her flesh colored hands and bright red fingernails and touched her blue denim jeans. She reached out for the bright orange fruit that now called to her for refreshment. She looked beyond her window to the greens of every shade that covered every yard she could see. She saw the colors of the flowers as they danced before her.

Everything seemed new again. The colors sang and brought life back. The colors that she didn’t realize were gone had returned once again.

 

I praise God that everyday He reminds me to see His world through His eyes. I thank God that everyday He teaches me to be his child, not seeking to be a people-pleaser, but to be a child of worship…in living color…even as I colored outside the lines.

 

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