I’ve always been drawn to the beauty of the color white. An all-white bouquet of flowers. The simplicity of white walls, a soft white rug, and white couch and pillows. A sharp white pant-suit. I’ve considered white the absence of color; somewhat a blank palette. But science says otherwise. White actually reflects ALL color. Sunlight is white light that is composed of all the colors of the spectrum.  A rainbow is proof. You can’t see the colors of sunlight except when atmospheric conditions bend the light rays and create a rainbow.

As I’ve become older and more pensive, I like to look back on where this may have started. Or, better yet, what seed may have been planted that now represents itself as a love of the proverbial white blank slate. I don’t remember ever loving particularly flashy colors as a little girl. I definitely appreciated fashion and didn’t shy away from wearing something edgy (inasmuch as my very conservative parents would let me push boundaries). But you probably wouldn’t catch me in a sequined hot pink number. So where does white come in?

I think most of us are conditioned to see white as a symbol of purity. The baptismal garment. A wedding dress. Although probably terribly impractical for the times, I tend to imagine Biblical characters in white robes cinched with a rope or belt of some kind. And countless times scripture does reference white-as-snow being the after-effect of cleansing via the blood of Jesus. Revelation is full of references to white garments:

He who overcomes will thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels.

Revelation 3:5

But what if there’s more to white than meets the eye? What if part of what He sees in white is an infinitely-colored spectrum of possibilities? And what if, as His daughter, I am also predisposed to see beyond what is visible by my natural sight, to the prism provided by the perfect atmospheric conditions? I wonder if, when my Father looks at me clothed in my white garments, He sees not just a human forgiven of sins and washed white as snow, but as one bursting forth in all manner of color? Consider green, my favorite non-white color:

And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald.

Revelation 4:3

An emerald rainbow? Where is that in my Crayola box? Could it be that when the spring renders its green buds and blades of grass, held within the season is also a Noah-like colorful promise of new beginnings? Can we consider that a blank white slate is cosmic in its scope? And as we glance at what seems drab and colorless in the mirror, would we dare to think that our eyes may deceive us?

No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined the things that God has prepared for those who love him.

1 Corinthians 2:9

Not only has YOUR eye not seen what He has prepared, NO eye has seen. It’s beyond our capabilities, buried within the invisible spectrum of beauty being held so carefully by its Creator. I have run from the atmospheric conditions required to reveal it. The pressure to wait out the storm with a smile seems so disingenuous. But it’s not about hoping beauty will somehow follow the devastation. It’s knowing that it is already there, and was there before the storm revealed it. The intricacy of the full spectrum of color is divinely ordered.

Perhaps you are starting over; your life as you knew it obliterated. Maybe you are watching another emerge from the ashes in their newly acquired white garment. Held within the layers of this stark bouquet is the fragrance of new life; a life uncontained by the human eye. Allow Him to reveal its stunning beauty.