God's Palette Quotes

God’s palette of shifting hues is vast, subtle, and beyond our comprehension. We humans are like those colors. Subtle, shifting, unique. Non-binary. Unable to be labeled or singled out. Beautiful and one-of-a-kind, and seen by God’s eyes alone.

painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.

I thought I appreciated books, but this was an alter to the book gods. It was hard not to be impressed. I didn't know what had the most impact: the rosewood shelving, the rolling library ladders, the mezzanine floor with the ornate spiral wrought-iron staircases at each end, the carved moldings, the scent of well-loved books, or the silky Aubusson rugs in a soft faded palette of rose, sage and aqua.

God's wisdom is like the rainbow, in symmetry, beauty, and variety. He does not paint scenes merely in black and white, but uses a riot of colour from the heavenly palette in order to show the wonder of His wise dealings with His people. - Sinclair Ferguson

Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion. There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish. Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly defined. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the first royal inscriptions are found on combs and make-up palettes), most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.

You still think there’s a strict binary between the material world and the Pantheon. You think calling the gods is like summoning a dog from the yard into the house. But you can’t conceive of the dream world as a physical place. The gods are painters. Your material world is a canvas. And this Divinatory is an angle from which we can see the colors on the palette. This isn’t really a place, it’s a perspective. But you’re interpreting it as a room because your human mind can’t process anything else.

Our gifts are not from God to us, but from God through us to the world.

White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack

If God has given us the gift of creativity, 'much is required' in the way of our using it to his glory.

We all have a grain of god in us. We do get opportunities to realize it, when moments in life demand selfless deeds of compassion from us. But we often squander them.

In Greek mythology, the goddess Iris sped messages to the gods on the rainbow's arc. Her flower bears no perfume, but steam distillation of the root, or rhizome, yields orris, a precious essence that smells of candle wax, but its impression in perfume is powdery, silvery green, violet-like- a prize of the perfumer's palette. How I wish I could summon the goddess to carry my message to those I love. -DB

things were created by God and for God, no exceptions. Every note of music. Every color on the palette. Every flavor that tingles the taste buds. Arnold Summerfield, the German physicist and pianist, observed that a single hydrogen atom, which emits one hundred frequencies, is more musical than a grand piano, which only emits eighty-eight frequencies. Every single atom is a unique expression of God’s creative genius. And that means every atom is a unique expression of worship. According to composer Leonard Bernstein, the best translation of Genesis 1:3 and several other verses in Genesis 1 is not “and God said.” He believed a better translation is “and God sang.” The Almighty sang every atom into existence, and every atom echoes that original melody sung in three-part harmony by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Did you know that the electron shell of the carbon atom produces the same harmonic scale as the Gregorian chant? Or that whale songs can travel thousands of miles underwater? Or that meadowlarks have a range of three hundred notes? But the songs we can hear audibly are only one instrument in the symphony orchestra called creation. Research in the field of bioacoustics has revealed that we are surrounded by millions of ultrasonic songs. Supersensitive sound instruments have discovered that even earthworms make faint staccato sounds! Lewis Thomas put it this way: “If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants [singing] of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani [drumming] of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges [flies] hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.” Someday the sound will lift us off our feet. Glorified eardrums will reveal millions of songs previously inaudible to the human ear.

An ironic religion -- one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion -- a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps . . . the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices.

The end of learning, he said, is to “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him” by acquiring “true virtue” (Hughes 631). This reinforces and expands Sidney’s point that the end of learning is virtuous action.

Part of what Milton valued in a good book then was contact with the mind of an author rendered otherwise inaccessible by distance or time. Such contact is precisely what much modern and postmodern criticism insists we cannot have. Perhaps a secular world view inevitably leads to a universe in which a text is merely a playing field for the reader’s own intellectual athleticism. Perhaps only a Christian view (such as Milton’s) of the imago descending from God to author to text can preserve the writing of literature as an act of communication.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction. A good night kiss. Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other - and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life and unpredictable adventure rather that a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composed music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things. Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest's customary climate is perfect for a writer. It's cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called "the bottom below the bottom," those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria's Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs. Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they're missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as they non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they're too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete's foot), the roof leaks, they can't stop coughing, and they feel as if they're slowly being digested by an oyster. Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. "Paradise!" you'll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

Zoltán looked at them through the window. He hated the man. Now he hated work. Work for these? Work with these? He saw before him the great puszta. Here the long, cracked stripe of a ditch once again stole the blue of the sky, transforming it into a deeper colour, renewing it, like an artist's palette: every pool on the meadows, every clump of flowers, was a jewel on the bosom of nature, a diadem, a string of pearls: oh, nature was lovely... That is, it would be if it could... But mankind... Among these? Struggle, fight, this greedy little piece of meat... Dark furrows on the wondrous surface, the many-branched, tufted promise of the maize, jewelled patches on God's regal robe: why was the world so lovely? to cover up the ugliness of man?

And on God’s palette are the colors of the world, and one of those colors is black. So I will not fear the darkness, for it is of God’s making as death is another part of his grand design. My soul will walk in the darkness and shadows and marvel at the night sky. Death is but a journey back to the canvas of my God. —Requiem

Woman— the reason God painted the sky a ray of blues. Did you notice the stars I asked the Lord to hang for you in the night? Well, you’ll have to forgive me—I felt a need to express myself for you, so I used the heavens as a palette to write. A love letter, woman, that would never ever die. The heavens bow down to you, the earth gives way to who you are, woman: the celebration of my heart.

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

You got this.” I turn just before I exit the booth, connecting our eyes. “For me. Sing for me.” I hear the difference immediately. I don’t know if it’s Amber’s miracle tea that has saved more than one voice on a rough night, or if it was our pep talk, but Kai nails it. She measures her breathing, every phrase spaced as it should be. Every note, properly supported. And emotion . . . God, as jaded as I am, it takes a lot for me to get goosebumps, but my goosebumps have goosebumps when she sings the lyrics this time. I don’t stop her once. I’m afraid to, scared I’ll ruin something magnificent by meddling with it. And when I told her to sing for me, I didn’t expect her to sing to me, but she does, stretching a live wire between her eyes and mine. I’m not only transfixed, but also painfully aroused by the whole thing. It’s so incredibly personal to have my words in her mouth. It’s almost an erotic experience to see something that came from my mind, from my heart, dwelling inside of her. I scoot under the board as far as I can so these guys can’t tease me about getting a hard on for a second verse. My synesthesia is in overdrive. I close my eyes, trapping all the colors the music shows me beneath my eyelids, not sharing them with anyone. Bright gold mixed with blue and green, a musical paisley splashed across the palette of my mind, splashed across my senses.

You’d be bleeding out and I wouldn’t even notice. In fact, I’d use the blood to mix colors on my palette.

Something about the church being like Star Wars? I was trying to remember it today when I was talking to Father McKenzie, but I clean forgot.’ Buchan downed his drink, then placed the glass firmly on the table. There was nothing for him here, nothing good to come from sitting any longer. ‘They both look great,’ said Buchan. ‘The CGI on Star Wars, the colour palettes, the scope and the scale of the worlds they create, is extraordinary. Just like the Church looks great. So many wonderful buildings, so much jaw-dropping architecture and art. And the music too. Star Wars music, it’s epic. Some of the best, most iconic film music there is. And there’s tonnes, I mean, tonnes of great religious music, from, I don’t know, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen to Arvo Pärt’s Deer’s Cry, and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Everything in between. But then we get to the message, the dialogue, the script, the story... And they’re both shit.

Let us live by dreams and for dreams, undoing the Universe and remaking it, distractedly, as best suits our moment to dream. Let us do this conscious of its utter futility. Let us ignore life with every pore of our body, stray from reality with all of our senses, and abdicate from love with all our soul. Let us fill with useless sand the pitchers we take to the well, then empty them out, only to refill them and empty them again; the more futile the better. Let us weave garlands and, once they're finished, carefully, meticulously unpick them. Let us choose paints and mix them on the palette with no canvas before us to paint. Let us send for stone to chisel when we have no chisel and we are not sculptors. Let us render everything absurd and adorn our sterile hours with more utilities. Let us play hide and seek with our consciousness of being alive. Let us, with an amused, incredulous smile on our lips, listen to God telling us that we exist. Let us watch Time painting the world and finding the resulting picture not only false but hollow. Let us think with sentences that contradict one another, speaking out loud in sounds that aren’t colours. Let us affirm - and grasp, which would be impossible - that we are conscious of not being conscious, and that we are not what we are. Let us explain all this in an obscure, paradoxical way, saying that things have a divine, othersidedness to them, and let us not believe too much in that explanation so that we do not have to discard it. Let us carve out of empty silence all our dreams of speaking. Let us allow all our thoughts of action to slide into stagnant torpor. Yet dreamed landscapes are merely the smoke from known landscapes and the tedium of dreaming them is almost as great as the tedium of looking at the world. And hovering distractedly above all this, like a vast blue sky, the horror of living.

It did not occur to me at that time to ask God to reveal his vision for my life. On my own, following my head rather than my heart, I chose the safe path.

God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours of a palette.

Perfecting is a journey...There is no destination called perfection.

The back door closed as Megan came around the house, and she saw Finn cross the yard and head into the toolshed again. Megan wheeled her bike over to the side wall and propped it up with the others. She paused for a moment, listening. There was no noise. Nothing. What was he doing in there? God, I really hope it doesn’t involve a stack of Playboys or something, Megan thought, grimacing. Still, even with that disgusting thought in her mind, she couldn’t help giving in to her curiosity. Besides, she was supposed to be immersing. Part of that was finding out what guys did when they were by themselves in a toolshed, right? Bracing herself, Megan walked over to the door and pulled it open. Finn whirled around, his eyes wide, and stared at her. He was wearing a blue T-shirt that read Good Boys Vote and it was dotted with fingerprints of purple paint. His hair was a little more mussed than usual. “Okay, life flashing before my eyes,” he said, letting out a breath. “You scared the crap outta me.” “Sorry,” Megan said. Something in her mind told her that she should just back out of the room, but she was too stunned to move. Finn was not, thank goodness, doing anything unsavory. He was holding a paint palette and a brush and standing in front of a canvas. Around him, behind him, on the floor, and leaning against the walls were dozens of other canvases, all in various stages of completion.

We need to show the world in powerful, positive ways that artists devoted to God and to building His kingdom do not work with a cloudy lens or a drab palette, but, on the contrary, they see the world more clearly and colorfully because of His power in their lives.

God gives us a fresh canvas and a palette of colors each day. Paint with bright colors and bold strokes, you're always on display!

All humans are prone to violence. I just have better control over it.” “You don’t sound so convincing with blood dripping all over your face.” “Worried about me, baby?” “You’d be bleeding out and I wouldn’t even notice. In fact, I’d use the blood to mix colors on my palette.” “Ouch.” His voice drops. “Though you’re such a horrible liar. You looked as pale as a ghost when I was being punched.