Surprised
Our son, Austin, was doing his schoolwork yesterday… which involved doing some math which gave him the answers so that he could color by number… and he excitedly showed me his skills. I was impressed at how he had stayed in the lines and filled everything in. As I commented on it, he held up a crayon and said that he colored the cardinal in the picture with that crayon. And he said something along the lines of, “Isn’t that funny, Daddy? I thought it was an orange crayon, but it really colors red.”
Surprised Also
We, too, sometimes get surprised by the crayons… aka, people… we come across in life, don’t we? They look like a snob… or a freak… or a geezer… or… or… or. We simply look at their wrapper and their shade, and we make what we think is an educated guess at who they are… and what they are like… and what they are capable of. But so often we are wrong. And yet we don’t know that we are wrong because we never give them a chance to show their true color.
From A Long Line of Surprised Folks
This has happened for thousands of years. In Scripture, one account is recorded for us to point out that we don’t always see people correctly. Samuel the prophet was sent by God to Jesse’s house to anoint the next king who would lead Israel. Jesse lined his sons up and presented them to Samuel in succession. Samuel was impressed with each one and thought that surely any of these guys were the right crayon to color with, but God brought a crayon from out in the field watching sheep who didn’t seem to be the right shade and told Samuel that he was the one who could rightly color the next page of Israel’s history.
About a thousand years later, Jesus chose to color with some crayons… aka, disciples… who didn’t look like the right choice by looking at their wrappers. And He reached out to people who didn’t seem to have the right wrapper to make a life change. And yet, over and again He proved that, just because someone’s wrapper and shade don’t appear to be the right one, it doesn’t mean they’re not the right one.
Give A Crayon A Chance
So, today… let’s choose to give a crayon a chance. Let’s stop and have that conversation with a person we might not normally talk to. Let’s offer that job to someone who doesn’t seem to match up on paper to what we’re looking for. Let’s dig a little deeper, actually pick up that crayon and color with it before we determine whether it is what we think is right or not. We just might find ourselves pleasantly surprised like my six year old doing his schoolwork.
allenchapin.com 
That was great.
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Thanks!
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