We all see in color. We get up in the morning and choose what colors we will wear in what arrangement to greet the day, and each other. We choose to paint that wall Benjamin’s Moore’s Mountain Peak White and not White Dove. We wear Kiehl’s Pure Petal pink and not Pop of Peony, because we feel it makes us look washed out. We eat the yellow bananas, not the green, and definitely not the brown. We’re appalled by certain purples, but soothed by certain blues that ironically helped create those purples. We want to eat the deep pink raspberries but only drink the Technicolor, neon blue ones. On the cosmetic shelves of stores, my skin color has been named mocha, cappuccino, nut brown, mahogany, deep warm, cocoa, deep cool, and espresso. And, it goes on like an endless barista menu at a coffee bar that's nestled inside an interior design boutique. We all see and judge in color, and the color of my skin and the color of your skin is included in this. They matter in the world whether we like it or not — for better or for worse. 

I am usually the only black person in the room. That is what this is, what this blog is all about: me being the only one, most days, in most of the places I go. 

Did you know that we can see up to 10 million colors, but we can only sense about a thousand levels of light to dark? To us, black is black until it's next to a darker black, and then we wonder if it's actually blue. We see so little variation. Unknowingly, we so often narrow our scope of black and of white. So therefore, we narrow our experience of the complexities of each color. We miss the nuances because we can't see the differing hues. These stories I hope widen our lenses. My days radiate a unique color of the Imago Dei reflecting a particular shade and hue that He specifically chose for me to wear, and said that it was “Good.”