God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end. So I concluded there is nothing better than to be happy and enjoy ourselves as long as we can. And people should eat and drink and enjoy the fruits of their labor, for these are gifts from God. – Ecclesiastes 3:11-13

Sunday morning in church Rebekah joked about a few of the things she’d like to do in retirement (in the distant future). One, she said, was to be the voice of iPhone Siri, or maybe the GPS, and have fun telling people to turn around, re-navigate, or how to find the nearest hamburger joint: “I’m sorry but I can’t comply; you need to reduce your cholesterol…”

Her other idea was to be the person who names paint colors. She’d better get on with it soon, because they seem to be running out of the ones that sound anything like colors. Of course with palettes representing 168 possible shades of white, each with its own unique name, creativity – and absurdity – is advancing at an exponential rate.

At Maul-Hall we’re close to the finish line with our downstairs remodel (we started with the dining room, this time last year), and it occurs to me we have some pretty interesting paint names going on.

I could say that the dining room is green and off-white with white trim, the living room is off-white and beige with white trim, the kitchen is green and off-white with white trim, and the laundry room is beige and off-white with white trim. But that wouldn’t be right.

The truth is more interesting:

• The dining room and entry are Autumn Sage, Clay Angel, and Arctic White;
• Both the living room and laundry are Natural Tan, Greek Villa, and Arctic White;
• The Kitchen is Chatroom, Sedate Gray, Moderne White and Arctic White…

Doesn’t that just sound so much better?

NUANCE: Personally, I quite enjoy the fine nuances. The color “Clay Angel,” for example, was actually inspired from a visit to a little known Italian renaissance church. The “color research analyst” took digital samples from an ancient base-relief sculpture found in a basement, then replicated the color profile in the laboratory.

“Greek Villa” really is evocative of a Mediterranean plaster house on the seaside; “Autumn Sage” actually captures the peculiar green of early fall; “Sedate Gray” has a legitimate calming presence; and I wouldn’t have understood the essential quality of “Arctic White” if Rebekah and I hadn’t stood on the cold, cold deck of a cruise-liner deep into an Alaskan fjord and watched great chunks of it fall hundreds of feet off the glacier and into the frigid waters.

The remaining colors – “Chatroom,” Natural Tan,” and “Moderne White” – are all excellent hues, and they complete the perfect color palette; but I think we may have to come up with some better names.

THEOLOGY & MORE: Colors are like people. Some live in the primary range, where everything is either red, blue, or yellow. These folk typically include the secondary colors (orange, purple, and green), but they think of it as one primary list.

But this idea of a nuanced perspective isn’t just about color. I think my theology is best understood this way, along with my appreciation of language, ideology, music, politics, and so much more.

It might be an interesting study to observe correlations between a “How extensive is your color wheel,” question and the way that we experience other parts of our lives?

People who only see a few, narrowly defined, choices, tend to be unable to work together to accomplish common goals. This is painfully true in politics and faith, where the color wheel typically has two settings: “The way I see things,” and “100% wrong!”

Experiencing life in all 168 shades of “white,” – and more – DEREK