Never Ever Dull
With every conversation, I always seem to end with "Never a dull moment"....our lives are rich, complex, and beautiful stories. Join me in laughing about everyday things and appreciating life-bumpy roads and all.
I love the scene in The Wizard of Oz that flips from black and white to full color, rich and vibrant (at least for a 1939 film)-a sharp contrast that initially surprises the viewer. For so many years, I lived in the black and white: I grew up with loving parents who were married to each other for fifty plus years. They raised four kids clearly defining what was right and wrong. I embraced their teachings seriously and lived them out. Recently, it hit me how much I've changed in how I view things. I was totally a person who saw black and white. Examples: You had to finish college, you had to get a good job, you had to have the right friends, you had to marry well...and then I got divorced. Divorce, in my eyes, was not in the "right" category. When faced with no other option, divorce had to happen for me. But it didn't fit neatly into my black-white world. Divorce was simply wrong. No matter that the highly recommended Christian counselors nudged me after two months of meeting with me (even handing me the name of an attorney to walk me through the process), I just had a hard time resigning to the fact that I would become one of those statistics (i.e. "Number of Christian couples that divorce"). I was stuck for a long time. My counselors stated I needed to learn "to live in the gray". So, I trained my brain to do just that. That shift took awhile and I'm actually thankful that I was nine hours away from family and friends to really own it myself. It was my journey to process and grasp that my world was now upside-down and very gray. I held onto my children, leaned on God, and worked through my-now-gray-world. Funny thing is that I don't see my world as black and white or gray anymore. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, my world transitioned from dull, lackluster colors to vibrant hues. I embrace life around me. I really concentrate on listening and understanding people and where they are coming from to grasp the full vivid picture. I get that lives can get tangled up in a huge web of confusion and conflict. But in all of that, great things can happen. I see things now more than ever through the lens of grace, humility, hope and love. That's made my life so much richer, bringing vibrancy to my world. Living in color brings challenges since it's so much easier to default to a black and white mode to check off how you perceive a person or situation. But It's worth making that concerted effort because I think life was meant to be lived in color.
1 Comment
Claire
4/18/2015 03:44:27 am
Amy, this is an inspiring post.
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AuthorFun-loving mom to 4 kids and 1 big puppy. Fifth grade teacher of amazing little people who have never ending things to share with me. Love to discuss Jesus, diy projects, and life. Trying to keep it simple: Love Jesus, love people. Archives
December 2021
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