In an upcoming confirmation class, I’ll be explaining how the church year is put together. We’ll go through the seasons, festivals, special Sundays, and the colors associated with them. To help communicate the material, I will share a blank chart that we fill in together as we review the liturgical year. So in preparation, I decided to find some red, green, purple, and white crayons to fill in the spaces representing the seasons with their corresponding colors.
I found two big containers of crayons in a Sunday School supply closet and quickly discovered that I had assumed a more difficult task than I imagined. Just plain green? Are you kidding? I found “Screamin’ Green,” “Granny Smith Apple,” “Olive Green,” and “Forest Green” before I located a crayon simply labeled “Green.” What looked like red crayons were actually “Cerise,” “Fuchsia,” “Magenta,” and “Wild Strawberry.” Purple was easily confused with “Plum,” “Cerulean” and “Blue Violet.” White was the only color that was easy to spot. When I managed to extract enough plain old purple, red, and green crayons from this veritable mine of colors, I felt like I had discovered precious gems.
A recent visitor to our church expressed frustration over the fact that there are so many different kinds of “Christian” churches. In fact, she told me, “there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as ‘plain Christian.’” True. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll be even more frustrated than if you’re searching for plain red in a pile of crayons.