the color gray

I'm learning a lot about colors these days... mostly, gray. I sort of feel like a kid in elementary school... when the teacher holds up a colored piece of paper and says, "Class, what color is this?" Strange... I must have been absent on the day we learned about gray.

See... I guess I've wanted to live most of the time as if life were black and white. You know... this or that, one or the other. It's not so strange, really. I like to organize and categorize things and try to make sense of them. It's usually been to my benefit in life. BUT... some of life cannot be categorized and organized. Not everything is black and white.

So... lately, I've been hearing Jesus say, "Bethany, let me teach you about gray." I think He's teaching me how to live in a world that can't always be systematized or categorized or organized. What do you do when you set up great expectations that sometimes LIFE doesn't follow? What do you do with people who you want to stick in the "black" or "white" category, but you find that people, of all things, don't stay in categories well? What do you do when you find that your little, well-constructed system really doesn't work?

Oh my word... you let go. You just let go. You open your hands... because you realize that your hands really aren't as big or as powerful as you thought they were. You open your hands and you grab the hands of Jesus... you hold on for dear life. You learn to FOLLOW. You learn to TRUST. You learn to live in the gray... because you realize that your categories really aren't as great as you thought they were anyway.

By the way, when I say "you," I mean "I". =)

I think this will be a life-long lesson for me. There will always be a part of my flesh that wants everything to fit neatly into a little system. Oh... but how thankful I am that Jesus lives in me, and if I listen, I will continue to hear Him say, "Let go, Beth. I am your system. I can take care of all of the things that are SO beyond you." So... I'm learning to listen... and as I do, I wonder if I might actually start to like the color gray...