The other day during a routine long and bumpy bus ride I breathed in a sigh of content. The now familiar Indian smells, sites, and sounds brought comfort to me after a hectic day of travel. As blurred faces passed by outside my window I became consumed by the wall art behind them. It spread out for several yards and was painted with the most vibrant colors and intricate designs. Then, out of no where, some one had spray painted with a harshly contrasting shade of black across the middle of the artwork ‘not everyone’s world is full of color’.
Stop for a second and think about how powerful that is.
After I reveled upon this discovery, my view from my bus window shifted. I now noticed the homeless man sleeping on a pile of trash under a burlap sack. I could no longer ignore the half-clothed children lined along the street begging for food and money. I could see the pain in the eyes of the mother barely scraping by.
It’s astounding how much I could blindly tune out in my content state of being. The comfort zone I had slipped into blockaded a whole side of life that I had been missing not just in India, but at home as well.
When your world has always been full of color it’s easy to become ignorant to the harsh realities that many people face everyday. I know because I’ve been there. I was that girl sipping on her regular Starbucks drink with her iPhone in hand while surfing her MacBook and complaining about how hard my life was because of a minor inconvenience I had encountered that day. Then, it seemed life altering and dramatic. Now, I laugh and have little sympathy for that girl; not only because of the poverty that I have seen here in India, but also because of how many people in America alone are living a life of faded color. In the grand scheme of things, how much does what you’re complaining about really matter?
I don’t ever want to be content again. I want to constantly be searching after the next thing that God has in store for me; the newest adventure, widow to console, or orphan to love on. I pray that God will give me eyes that are never blind to the way he sees his creation.
If you’re living a life that has always been full of color, the best advice that I can offer to you is to travel. I’m not saying you have to go and live out of a tent and backpack for a year because I know that’s not for everyone. But what I am saying is there is so much more to the world than the cookie cutter version of life we have formed in America. By being the brightly colored paintbrush to someone living in a dim world, your own life becomes brighter too. No matter where you are, just make sure you’re doing the thing; boldly loving and serving those starving for a God who is ready to make their world abundantly filled with vibrant colors.
