Black or Blue?

            Great peace have those who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble. Psalm 119:165

                A good thing about working in the men’s department of a certain store was that I got to work with color. One of the challenges that my customers and I sometimes had was distinguishing between dark blue and black. Fortunately, the store’s colors were black, khaki, and white. I almost always wore black slacks, and often a black top, so I would take the garment of uncertain color and lay it across my black clothing. Granted the shade of black or blue in the material might not be the right shade for the item they already have at home, but at least it was closer.

                The Law is my black pants or shirt. Putting something up against it lets a person identify whether the thing is this, or that. There are lots of very specific examples that we no longer need, but those fit into greater principles that give the fabric of our lives their color. Of course, the color found in the Bible isn’t the only color out there. One could choose to wear burgundy, which has its own set of difficulties, sometimes worse than black or blue. One would hope that the burgundy one has as an example is a good, solid burgundy.

                The problem is that we don’t want to have our clothes match the black, blue, or burgundy standards. We want this bit of black, another bit of blue, some burgundy over there, and the whole box of 500 Crayola colors mixed in. And that might be acceptable, if certain areas were certain colors, so that you could test a garment against it. But when you mix too many colors together, what you get is something rather muddy and indifferent.

                To use a different metaphor, too many cooks spoil the broth, or stuffing.

You can’t get good directions to a destination if you don’t know the destination or if “any destination will do.”   And it might not be a good idea to get directions to a destination half way across the country from someone who’s never left the town you’re in.

Picking a set of principles is vital to life. Picking the right set of principles is more so. The clearer the color of those principles, the easier it is to know if what you’re doing is of the same color. That brings peace.