Count Your Blessings #66 – Shades of Grey

Grey – what picture does that word paint in your mind. Is the picture characterised by dull, drab or even dreary.

I thought I’d have a look on the Dulux Paints web site to see how they describe grey. I looked through their vast range of colours but couldn’t find anything called ‘grey’. The grey colours are called wonderful things like ‘Ebony Mists’, ‘Ice Storm’, ‘Clouded Slate’ and ‘Quartz Flint’.

Grey isn’t just a colour though it’s used to describe and symbolise all sorts of things. If you are grey haired then you are old. If you look grey you look ill.

So why is grey a blessing?

There are two types of grey that I regard as a blessing. The first is the grey you find in black & white photographs. The thing with black & white photographs is that they aren’t black & white, they are shades of grey. There is something about a picture that is made up of shades of grey that brings a depth and vitality that you just don’t get with pictures in full colour.

The other grey I find a blessing is the grey that exists in the answers to so many questions that we ask. These questions don’t have an answer that is yes or no, right or wrong, black or white. The answers to these questions are grey, they are more complicated than black or white. We have a choice with these questions. We can either regard the grey as something of a problem, or we can regard the grey a something to treasure, something to contemplate and something to chew over. Chewing over the question doesn’t change the question, but it does change us, it often leads into other questions. Treasuring these questions can help us to understand how other people see the same question.

Martyn Joseph wrote a song about this:

Treasure the Questions

Locked in my heart there’s a child
Knocking the door to get out
Asking the questions that hurt and
Sometimes there’s a question of doubt
I can’t pretend that it’s easy
I can’t pretend that I win
When your search in this life is over
That’s when the struggle begins

And if I don’t find out the search is not in vain
And if I don’t find out I
Treasure the questions as they rage in my mind
I treasure the questions some day I will find
I ran out of answers such a long time ago
And I treasure the questions wherever I go

Searching Sahara’s of sorrow
Trying to understand why
But the journey has brought me so much closer
I don’t have to stand here and lie
Over and over I cried in the darkness
Over and over to see
The crime is to sit and not wonder
Renewing my mind set me free

And if I don’t find out the search is not in vain
And if I don’t find out I
Treasure the questions as they rage in my mind
I treasure the questions some day I will find
I ran out of answers such a long time ago
And I treasure the questions wherever I go