I sat watching my friend, a very talented painter, create a beautiful painting of a field covered with wildflowers. I watched how much detail went into each brush stroke.
He had never taken formal art lessons, but he told me that painting the sky would take more “seeing” than first meets the eye. He told me how each blade of grass is not the same color and neither are the petals on one flower. He broke up the images into layers of colors and textures. Each detail in my friend’s painting was carefully planned. From a distance you could not always detect the many hues of color, but up close each brush stroke was slightly different variation on a color. The end result was a very special form of perfected, organized chaos.
I think that God has formed people in a similar way. There are layers of art put into each individual that God has created. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13-14).
Different
Sometimes it is difficult to spot how different one person is from another, because the common trend is to try and fit in with everybody else. Other times the difference is very noticeable.
I spent much of my life wishing I could fit in. Adopted as a little girl, I did not understand why I (a Bangladeshi) had dark brown skin, and perfectly straight, black hair while my family had fair features. From a young age I was faced with the question, “Why are you ‘black’ and your parents ‘white’?”
When I was five or six years old all I could say as an answer was, “because my parents adopted me.” Now I think I would add that God created a beautiful painting. Not every part of it is the same color and that is what makes it beautiful. He created different colors of people and then he declared that each one was “fearfully and wonderfully made”—made by His loving artist hands.
