We had some friends over for dinner the other night. The kids were playing Chutes and Ladders. Emery was certainly in a mood. He kept tattling and whining, which is really not like him. He was having a difficult day. He came up to tell us something about what someone else was doing wrong, and after he had shared that, he exclaimed, "I have to be the broken crayon." The kids had lost a game piece, so Emery's marker was a broken crayon. I've been thinking about it ever since.
The parable of the broken crayon:
No one loves to color with a broken crayon. They are hard to hold, they don't have a nice fine point for coloring near the edges, and sometimes you can't read the color off the wrapper.
We're all like broken crayons sometimes, hard to hold (love), we don't work the way we're meant to (staying inside the lines, looking and acting the part) and sometimes we don't even know who we are. The amazing thing, is that we're still serviceable, just like Emery's crayon was. Sometimes, what we think we need to be (a perfect pointy crayon) isn't all our usefulness. Emery's crayon was more than a coloring utensil, it was a marker to hold his place in a game. Can we fill a niche that we didn't know we were made for? Absolutely. Can we be useful in an area we're not perfect in? Yes! Can we change our goals and our outcomes? For sure. Knowing your skill set is important, but knowing you can change is liberating.
The moral of the story: Looks can be deceiving, even broken crayons make beautiful pictures!
No comments:
Post a Comment