The White Crayon

These days my daughter is obsessed with crayons. And when I say obsessed, I mean she REALLY enjoys dumping them everywhere, and then “mixing” them up with her hands, aka sending them flying all over the room into all those tiny, hard-to-get-to areas I pretend don’t exist when I clean.

She does sometimes actually get the crayon onto the paper though, and when she does, she demands help from whichever lucky person is sitting the closest to her. She’ll hand you a crayon and say, “hulp, color?” And you stop whatever important adult-thing you’re doing and you color that Curious George page.

It’s pretty adorable I must say.

But have you ever noticed that there’s always one crayon that stays in the crayon box, one crayon that keeps it’s pristine sharp point and neat wrapper?

The white crayon.

Every kid goes through the same process with the white crayon. Pick it up, color for a second, stare at the paper with a confused look. Try it again. Chuck it back in the box. Make a mental note to never use that defective crayon again.

I mean, what’s the point of coloring with a crayon when you can’t even see what you’ve colored?

Well one day I was watching Ellia color away when I noticed this whole event go down. I saw her pick up the white crayon and thought to myself “this won’t take long.” Sure enough, she was back to the purple crayon in seconds and the white one was tossed to the side.

As I sat there watching her it dawned on me that in a way we all have that white crayon in our life in one way or another.

Do you ever feel like no matter how hard you work on something to get a specific result that you just never see those results?

Almost like you’re coloring with a white crayon and no matter how hard you press down or how long you work at it you never see the color show up on the page?

I feel like this a lot in parenting. With discipline. With my toddler’s attitude. With MY attitude. With a million other little things every day (don’t even get me started with housework and laundry).

And especially with character building.

Sometimes I just feel like I’m not getting anywhere with my toddler. I’m not getting through. The color’s not showing up like it’s supposed to.

One day Ellia obeys when I say “don’t touch that.” The next day she touches it 3 times in a row just to see what mommy will do about it.

So the rest of that day I work on teaching her that she needs to obey mommy because mommy loves her and she wants her to be safe. Over and over and over again we go through it and she’s disciplined.

Character building, right?

The next morning she wakes up and first thing she does…runs over to touch it.

Ellia hates sharing. It drives me crazy how naturally selfish she can be (probably because I see it in myself and know that’s where she’s getting most of it from).

So we work on sharing all day.

I try to be creative and purposeful with every opportunity that pops up that could be a learning experience.

“I’m going to be a good mom and teach lessons so she’ll love sharing,” I think to myself. “She’s going to be that kid at the playdate that all the other moms are amazed by. She’ll be the best share-er ever!”  

Ha.

At the end of the day, as she’s snacking on some Cheetos I ask her, “Ellia can you share one of those with mommy?” Aaaaaand she promptly stuffs her whole handful in her mouth so she won’t have anything to share… “mo,” she says through her mouthful of cheese puffs, “mine.”

Sigh.

But then one day something pretty cool happened. I had set Ellia up with some paint and her crayons and as she was slapping paint onto her paper (and all over the curtains next to her) I noticed something that made me smile.

She had used the white crayon and I could see her designs (aka scribbles) clear as day!

As a former art teacher I recognized it right away. It’s called “resist painting.” The wax crayon repels the watercolor paint that is brushed over it and the watercolor paint adheres to the paper surrounding the crayon, making it show up nice and bright!

And it hit me.

Just because I might not see the results I’m working towards doesn’t mean that they’re not there… or that they’re not coming.

Teaching Ellia to share, for example, is exhausting work (seemingly impossible a lot of the time) and I may not see the results I want to see right away… but that doesn’t mean that it’s not building her little character deep down.

A character that shines through when life is thrown at it like that paint on the paper.  

This is our job as parents, and it’s also a huge part I think of why parenting is such a hard job.  

Helping to build our children’s character for this crazy world we live in is no easy task and impossible on our own.

It’s always amazed me that we have a God who knows our hearts and our characters better than we know our own yet still loves us.

Isaiah says the the Lord has searched us and knows us, He understands our thoughts and knows our ways.

He knows every word before it comes off our tongue.

He doesn’t need paint to see our character.

And even after knowing all of that, He continually works on us to build our character, no matter how desperate of a case we may be. He doesn’t give up on us.

He tries to teach us obedience because He loves us and He knows it’s for our own protection. He tries to teach us to share and to love those around us.

Many times we can’t see the fruits of our labor and we’re tired, frustrated, and overwhelmed. But take heart because the character of your little cutie is so worth the elbow grease!

And believe it or not, our own character is being molded in the midst of it all.

So the next time you feel like you’re frantically scribbling with a white crayon on white paper and struggling to see the whole picture, remember that it’s not for nothing.

Hopefully when life brushes over that little character, it’ll be a beautiful design that shows up.