By Stephanie Ellison

“Momma, when did the world turn to color?”

My daughter Molly asked me that question after watching The Andy Griffith Show when she was around four or five years old. In her little mind, what she was seeing made perfect sense. The television show was black and white, so obviously the whole world must have been black and white back then, too. Somewhere along the way, she figured, the world simply turned to color. I love imagining everything turning to color as our lives form!

I remember smiling at the innocence of her question, but all these years later, I am thinking about her little voice asking that question. I find myself thinking about it differently. There is something so beautiful about the way children see the world. In their first five years, things are still wonderfully simple. People are friends because they like each other. You help someone because they need help. You forgive because someone says they are sorry. You ask questions when you don’t understand something, and you don’t worry about whether you should already know the answer. There aren’t a thousand layers underneath everything yet. There are not as many knots twisting them up from mind to gut to spirit.

Of course, as adults, we know the world didn’t suddenly turn to color although it did remind me of a time when I thought there were little tiny men sitting in the stoplights making them change from red to green to yellow. I know it has been colorful all along. But sometimes I wonder if growing up and knowing more has actually made it harder for us to see the world as clearly as children sometimes do. Somewhere along the way, we learn labels and sides. We learn suspicion. We learn to assume motives and make judgments. We learn all the reasons we are supposed to be different from one another. Things that once seemed simple somehow become incredibly complicated.

Sometimes I wish we could go back, not because the world was actually simpler then, but because the way we looked at it was. I wish we could approach people with curiosity before judgment. I wish we could ask questions when we don’t understand instead of immediately deciding what we think. I wish we could see the person standing in front of us before we see their opinions, their political views, their background, their mistakes, their differences, or any of the other things we use to define one another.

My daughter once asked me, “Momma, when did the world turn to color?” The funny thing is, the world had been in color all along. She just didn’t know it yet.

Maybe there is something worth remembering in that. Could it be that the world is still more beautiful, more colorful, and a little less complicated than we’ve learned to believe. Maybe every once in a while, we need to borrow the eyes of a young child and look at it again.

❤️Love Stephanie