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).

There was a blind woman who hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone, except her loving boyfriend. He was always there for her. She told her boyfriend, ‘If I could only see the world, I will marry you.’ One day, someone donated a pair of eyes to her. When the bandages came off, she was able to see everything, including her boyfriend.

He asked her, ‘Now that you can see the world, will you marry me?’ The girl looked at her boyfriend and saw that he was blind. The sight of his closed eyelids shocked her. She hadn’t expected that. The thought of looking at them the rest of her life led her to refuse to marry him.

Her boyfriend left in tears and days later wrote a note to her saying: ‘Take good care of your eyes, my dear, for before they were yours, they were mine.’ This is how the human brain often works when our status changes.  Only a very few remember what life was like before, and who was always by their side in the most painful situations. Life is a gift today, so before you say an unkind word, think of someone who can’t speak.

Before you complain about the taste of your food, think of someone who has nothing to eat.  Before you complain about your husband or wife, think of someone who’s crying out to God for a companion.  Today, before you complain about life, think of someone who went too early to Heaven.  Before whining about the distance you drive, think of someone who walks the same distance with their feet.  And when you are tired and complain about your job, think of the unemployed, the disabled, and those who wish they had your job.  And when depressing thoughts seem to get you down, put a smile on your face and think: you’re alive and still around.

I was walking yesterday with someone who had twisted their ankle a few days prior which led to a conversation about shoes.  I said I had seen Tim Ferris wearing glove like shoes for your feet and had heard even before seeing them that running barefoot was actually better for you than wearing tennis shoes.  Ironically I saw an article today about Vibram’s FiveFingers “shoes” which basically let you go barefoot without tearing up your feet so I decided to blog about it. The premise is going shoeless allows the foot to flex and better absorb shock.  When people wear shoes they tend to land on their heels.  Wired has a great article about it if you want to read more.  I think if you were to wear them you would probably get some strange looks but has anyone tried them yet?