I’m colourblind, and profoundly so.
This admission in front of people usually results in a long litany of being asked what colours certain items in the room are and which colours I can’t see. I do pretty well at the test, you learn to cope and have some sense of what something might be. The colours I can’t see is harder to answer because it doesn’t really work like that.
I can see primary colours easily and identify them clearly. The places between colours on the spectrum get more difficult, and also between colours that I’m told aren’t near each other on the spectrum (pink and blue, for example). Leaf colour changes in Autumn aren’t the easiest for me to notice.
I’m told that I actually see in variations of brown and grey except for primary colours and that if you could see through my eyes the world would look flat and uninteresting. From behind my eyes it looks anything but. In the same way that we can only speak comparatively within our frame of reference, I can only see within mine: bright colours look bright, the world is a richly textured theatre of God’s glory.
It’s difficult for me to think in colour. I don’t notice the colours of things, it was only a few years ago that I learned that different denominations of banknotes are different colours. When I confess this people ask how I knew which one was which without thinking that they have large numbers on them. I’ll see two things that are the same colour as distinctly different colours if they have different textures. I’m not sure that’s a useful superpower.
You can buy glasses that fix colourblindness these days, it affects one in twelve men, after all. I don’t think they’re available with prescription glasses like the ones I wear but I did the test anyway. My sight is much too bad for them to work for me. The advertising for the glasses has videos of middle-aged men being asked to put them on and then stopping dead in slack-jawed wonder at how beautiful the world is. They remind me of the wonderful videos of deaf children who can hear their parents’ voices for the first time due to implants; there’s a glory to them. When we see someone else’s wonder that is itself enough for us to catch a glimpse of the truth behind things. Wonder is infectious, it teaches us to see.
I’ve often pondered how I might respond that first moment in the new creation, when the cones in my eyes can perceive all the wavelengths of light like yours probably can. I assume a breath of wonder that what I thought was a richly marvellous world shot through with God’s glory was significantly more beautiful than I had previously realised.
There will, I guess, be some truth to that. Except, my suspicion is that everyone is going to react like that. Could it be that a world steeped in the sins of men and fallen powers is drab in ways we cannot perceive? Could it be that the world remade will be much more vibrant than our sin-cursed eyes can currently see? Could it be that the world now, bruised and broken as it is, would look brighter and more glorious if only we had eyes with which to see?
There’s no way of knowing that, of course. But I do wonder if it could be the case.
Let’s look a little deeper, though, and peel away a layer of shadows. Because I don’t think that will be the first thing I notice in a renewed creation, and I don’t think it will be the first thing you notice either. Standing in a world bursting with abundance, outrageously fecund, I don’t think I’ll spot the colours. Not just because I’m not used to noticing them either. Standing in a world that looks like this sorrow-scoured gift, yet without the tear-tracks over our vision, what will I notice?
I wonder if I might see a rainbow as light refracts. I doubt I’ll have much time to contemplate its colour spectrum—vast and clear, I’m sure—before I see behind the rainbow (Revelation 10) at the man who is the source of that light. Creation as we live in it now is shot through with the glory of God; suffused with goodness and marred by spite. The new creation then, with both trees twisted into one (Revelation 21), life and wisdom united, will have the glory of God unveiled such that I won’t be able to see anything else.
This is a world in which it is no longer a fight to rightly order our loves, and all beauty we will love for the Lord’s sake. It will no longer strain our souls to see beyond the sunbeam to the sun, because we will have seen him and been transformed (1 John 3). Even the colours will reflect the glory of Jesus the Christ, the cosmic emperor, back towards him.
Which means that even now those colours whisper his name, that light shivers with anticipation that one day when trees claps and rivers sing (Isaiah 55) even that by which we see will join the chorus to triumphantly declare, above and beyond all things, that Christ is Lord. Any beauty you see, however shadowy and sucked of vibrancy, is an echo of the true and the good. Enjoy the light of the sun, the shade of clouds, and the colour of the sky: they too sing his name.
Photo by Christina Rumpf on Unsplash
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