gray

Thoreau wrote about how he would need to go stand by a fire every night “to burn off the dross of the world that had collected that day.” 

Whitman speaks of trying to get away from “the clank of the world.” 

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome warning it of how the world will attempt to “squeeze us into its own mold.”

The world does “collect” on us, you know.  It does.  So subtly that you don’t even know it.  You just wake up one day and it’s there.  You don’t recall how long exactly it has been there; or even what it looked like before.  But now it has become the lens in which you see all of life; yourself and others as well.

It’s not that different.  It is just gray…and gray lacks color.  It has become dulled.  That is what gray is: colorless…without color. Dull. Boring. Routine.  

Dull-(adj): uninteresting; not alive; having very little color; lacking depth.

Boring-(adj): dull and uninteresting

Routine-(n): commonplace, unimaginative, a constantly repeated action; predictable

It’s not our fault, is it? I am not sure, if given the choice, we would never choose to live a colorless life. It just happens. It just does. Maybe because we aren’t intentional about life, and we just follow the crowd. We follow the crowd for years and years, yet no one will ask who the leader is or where the hell we are going; or why.

Gray becomes normal; it becomes so normal; that we mistake it for color. Only because we have forgotten what color even looks like. When this happens; Gray is where we sometimes find ourselves if we don’t keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. In Jesus there is LIFE. Jesus came to give life abundantly. Full. Life in Jesus is the only way to be fully alive; to be about the things we were created for.

Anything…life outside of Jesus is not life at all. It’s fake life. It’s GRAY.

“An intriguing entomological experiment shows that a male butterfly will ignore a living female butterfly of his own species in favor of a painted cardboard one, if the cardboard is big.  If the cardboard one is bigger than he is, bigger than any female butterfly ever could be he jumps the piece of cardboard.  Over and over again, he jumps the piece of cardboard.  Nearby, the real, living female butterfly opens and closes her winds in vain.”  Annie Dillard The Writing Life, p.18

You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live.  (Eph)