The Fourteenth Shade of Gray

My freshman year of college I decided, in a burst of inspiration brought on by caffeine, to take an art class. Instead of tests we did portfolios, made from leftover cardboard and stuffed with crisp paper smudged with pencil and charcoal. Our final was a microcosm of the class: no exams, no bubbles to fill in; no, our passing grade hinged on our ability to make a grayscale.

A grayscale is a row of boxes, the number up to your teacher’s discretion, which you shade in from white to black. And they had to be just so, the perfect shades of gray.

As I sat up late into the morning in a marathon effort to finish, my neck straining and my fingers cramping, I realized how hard shades of gray are. They gain hues too similar, or otherwise jump from off-white to near black. While filling in what felt like the fourteenth shade of gray, I desperately missed the days of black and white.

In our youth, everything is black and white. The coloring books starkly paint the lines; the letters make bold statements as you learn your name in lead. The largest artistic criticism we receive is “you shouldn’t eat the glue.” Everything is marked in strong fat lines, and you know which is white, which is black.

Which is right. Which is wrong.

Morality even comes two-toned when we are young. People do right and people do wrong. Everyone we know, the friends we have, everyone falls starkly into these two categories. There is no middle ground. The entire world around us is shaped in these sharp contrasts - contrasts we can easily see and define and know. Life is uncomplicated in black and white.

But we grow, and everyone takes on shades of gray. Suddenly what’s right and what’s wrong take on new shape. The controversial people, the ones struggling with sexuality, the liars, the divorcees, the alcoholics and addicts, are no longer confined to television and sermons. They become members of our lives. Our family, our friends, people we meet. And they are lost and lonely, just as much as the rest of us. They are wandering and wondering where to turn. And we get lost in the grays.

Life gets shady.

And so we are left trying to find the values of these shades. The only problem is, we are woefully bad at it at times. Everything mucks up the colors. Their sins, their problems, darken the canvas. But their light, their personality, the love and joy we find in them brings tints of white wash. We don’t know what to do with the values. We love them dearly for the lighter tints inside them; but the darkness makes us pull away. Man has never been comfortable in the dark. We are all just stumbling, our hands reaching blindly for canvas.

It is so important in these shady times to have a real relationship with God. We can’t have a black-and-white faith in a grayscale world. As life and love and relationships grow more complicated before our eyes, and we see the shades for what they are, we must flesh out our line of faith. He reminds us that we were never so stark and uncomplicated, that we are just as muddled gray as the next person. Our shades should never bar us from reaching out with love. But with love we still must admit to the sin, to the blackness, and never find refuge or complacency with it, within others or us. For us as mere creations, this sounds hard. It is. But with God, with the Artist, he can simplify the grayscale. With him, he can explain these shades, these murky hues, and help us understand. With God, a real relationship with the real living God, we can do the artist’s impossible:

We can find the fourteenth shade of gray.