The White Crayon

OK, now that I have a child, I remember wondering about things I haven’t thought about in a long time.  My son Tyler likes to draw, well, scribble for now, and the other day he was drawing, and he pulled out the white crayon.  He scribbled with the white crayon and looked perplexed why it wasn’t producing color on the paper.  This leads me to ask: why do we have a white crayon in the crayon box of life, does anyone actually use it, and if so for what purpose? According to the Urban Dictionary, if someone is a “white crayon” it means they are utterly useless.

In 1903, when the Crayola crayons were first introduced, the white crayon was not one of the first original colors. It was added in 1949 following the aftermath of WWII.  Someone asked what the white crayon is used for on Yahoo Answers (glad I’m not the only one) and below is the community’s best answer: “They are best used for adding glare and highlights to your colored drawings. They provide more depth and interest than just flat color because they make objects have a reflectance value and your drawings will pop.”  OK, that sounds nice in theory but common who uses that crayon?

If something is white, it means it is the presence of the combination of all colors in the visible spectrum, which is really powerful if you think about it.  I mean, if a color has all colors in it, and the result is no color at all, maybe God is trying to tell us something. Perhaps our world focuses too much on color, and we need to see life as the white crayon (with no color at all).