Showing Our True Colors

Let your true colors shine through your busy days. Let those rich reds, yellows, and oranges shimmer with the brilliance of knowing who you are and why you do what you do. Then all you have to do to decide whether or not to move forward with a new activity is to determine if it fits with who you are and what you value most.

Let’s all think back to those wonderful elementary school science lessons where we learned things like what makes a lightning strike and what causes the seasons. The lesson I was thinking about today as I sat out on my balcony taking in a beautiful near fall sunrise over Mt. Hood was focused on what makes leaves change color.

I absolutely love seeing the brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds that have already starting popping up all over my neighborhood. But what makes these gorgeous colors? In reality, the leaves had the pigment inside them all the time. It was just overshadowed by the chlorophyl-rich nutrient gathering organelles that make leaves green. In the Fall, though, trees naturally stop gathering energy from the sun that they use during the spring and summer to grow branches, height, and fruits or seeds or propagation and instead prepare for winter.

Isn’t that a beautiful metaphor of how we so often hide our true and brilliant colors behind the guise of staying busy and productive and useful? We rush from one task to another stretching every time management trick we can to fill our days with work or kids’ activities or church responsibilities or tidying up. And if we’re not careful, we can start to believe that doing those things become if we are instead of being who we are and therefore we do what we do.

I’m definitely not against using our days filled with activity and projects, and work. That’s the nature of the modern life, and being engaged in good causes with good people can be incredibly rewarding and meaningful. But there’s a key added element that transforms a busy life into a meaning-rich life.

It’s a subtle but I think a very important distinction. In some ways, it flips those activities on their head and when we live in this new way, our activities are motivated by our deep sense of who we are rather than rushing around hoping that filling our days with good activities will magically reveal to us what our purpose and meaning for life should be.

So let your true colors shine through those busy activities. Let those rich reds, yellows, and oranges shimmer with the brilliance of knowing who you are and why you do what you do. That way, when you are faced with the prospect of adding another activity, all you have to do to decide whether or not to move forward is to decide if it fits in alignment with who you are and what you value most.