The Beauty of Color

I love colors. You can see all of my favorites when you walk into our house. Most of my favorite colors come from nature. The most prominent is blue. I love blue skies and blue water and especially cobalt blue. Although I have different shades of blue in carpet, drapes and pillows, I've never been brave enough to paint a wall cobalt blue.

I have however been bold enough to paint a wall the color of the mountains in Sedona, AZ. If you've never been there you won't understand. I fell in love with the beauty the very first time we drove through the area by chance, on the way somewhere else. Eventually we made a return trip just to bask in the beauty of the red-orange landscape and it became a favorite destination to return to again and again. In paint I chose a color called Ancient Copper. It is a warm and comforting color, to me anyway. It is the color of my office and the accent wall of our living room.

Now for many years we lived in an all off-white walls house, a nice change from 15 years in a mobile home with paneling on all the walls. But, I was ready for a change and old enough to no longer care so much about what someone else would think. So a couple of years ago we went for it and added color to our family room, kitchen and dining room. And believe it or not I have taken the colors into a brand new house - all freshly painted in neutrals - and transformed it into 'our' house, soon to be home, by adding color.

It instantly turned a house into our home, even without any furniture. I was pretty happy when the painter told me he loved the colors I chose. He said everything they paint these days is gray and he is tired of looking at gray. The Sedona color made him happy while he painted, he said. It makes me happy, too. Our new bedroom has an accent wall of "Naval" with the other three walls are "Caramel Kiss". The rest of the new house is a combination of neutral shades of taupe with white trim.

"Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made a richly ornamented robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him" (Genesis 37:3-4 NIV). Other versions say the robe was "brightly colored," or "of many colours."

May your world be filled with color to enjoy today.