THE COLOR OF OPPOSITES
The same color that signals danger is the color that keeps us alive.
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The first person I ever loved wore heaven on her lips. Though her words were most-often inviting and lovely, it was the softest red that moved with her mouth when she whispered “Je t’aime” that I was enraptured with.
If you have ever wondered, the secret to a little girl’s universe is tucked inside a mama’s makeup drawer, its couleur, Rouge à Lèvres.
At the hospital before receiving a guest she would whisper, “find my lipstick.” I always did. Her passion for life was evidenced in her smile, right up until her death.
My first inclination at her passing was to run to her drawer and find that little tube of otherworldly enchantment and place it on her lips.
I was determined that her Creator would receive her looking her most beautiful, just as her beloved friends did.
How opposite we visualized hard things, my mama and me. Not black and gloomy, but this breathtaking shade of red.
If you search my Journal you will come across 52 entries that in some way incorporate this mystery of Opposites. Perhaps I am a little obsessed. But it is something I have never forgotten about. It’s embedded in who I am.
This week, I had what I can only describe as “an encounter” with my Creator on the subject that had to do with a painful blood clot I’ve been contending with.
“What if the very thing that has been labeled as “harmful” is there to help you heal?”
The thought came from seemingly out of nowhere.
Instead of dismissing it I took a breath and clocked the time.
I had entered the land of opposites.
That’s where we discover His wisdom.
Life change of the unseen kind.
What we define as dangerous, restrictive, even unintended is orchestrated for good. Not only on some grand unknowable scale but embedded in the heart of the story we are living now.
This is not about a blood clot but revelation. The kind that comes without warning when we make ourselves available to hear.
“Angiogenesis.*” The word flowed in like life-giving water. I knew exactly what it meant. The blockage of blood flow is cutting off cancer’s lifeline, prohibiting the formation of new vessels and their fuel.
What if my body is not betraying me, but negotiating on my behalf?
What if what my team deemed as “harmful” is, in fact, a gift?
How many hard things “sent to you” have you categorically dismissed?
Like a parcel with the wrong address, you sent it back to Sender not understanding it was not only intended, but created, expressly for you?
We lay down [deep] in the pits we dig, don’t we? And then we wallow in the mire. But His goodness is like a river: Unstoppable in its power and good intention.
What tragedy that we don’t recognize it when it comes.
And still his promises pour out and over us even as we are stuck.
When you draw your conclusion, keep at the center of your thinking that the first interpretation is rarely the truest one.
When it comes to your Creator, He is always on your side.
The blessing is not only his invisible intervention but the knowledge of it,
the awareness of his presence active and daily in our lives.
What if the opposite is true?
The question changes everything about how we experience life.
My mother understood this before I did.
She met hospital corridors with rouge on her lips.
Not because she was naïve to suffering,
but because she refused to let darkness define the frame.
Red is the color that holds opposites—
Passion and Warning.
Life Blood and Sacrifice.
The same color that signals danger is the color that keeps us alive.
NOTES
I usually place the image caption at the end of this section.
Today it belongs here—
Jacqueline. I had remembered this photograph as black and white. When I pulled it out again, I was overjoyed to see the red— steady on her lips and surprisingly woven into the stripes of her blouse. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just present.
I have loved this image my entire life, but this week I saw something I hadn’t before.
She wasn’t naïve to hardship. She had walked through enough of it. And yet there it was — rouge in hospital corridors, color where others might have chosen gray.
Not denial. Not performance.
Definition.
She refused to let darkness choose the frame.
The same color that signals danger is the color that keeps us alive.
I think I am only now beginning to understand what she was teaching me even then.
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When something hurts, what do you instinctively do?
Do you:
Look for meaning?
Look for reversal?
Look for divine orchestration?
Reach quickly for a redemptive interpretation?
What happens in you between the moment something arrives… and the moment you decide what it means?
Is there space there?
Or do you rush to close it?
What if the most powerful place is not the explanation — but the interval before it?
What if the first narrative is rarely the truest one?
When you receive a diagnosis, a disruption, a constriction —
who assigns its meaning?
Is it medicine?
Fear?
History?
Your theology?
Your imagination?
Or do you pause long enough to ask:
What else could this be?
Can you resist immediate labeling?
Can you refuse panic as the first conclusion?
Can you wait before deciding whether something is interruption… or strategy?
Is it possible that not everything that blocks is betrayal?
That not everything painful is punishment?
That not everything constricting is sabotage?
What if hardship is not always interruption?
What if sometimes it is reordering?
What if the discipline is not in solving — but in suspending judgment?
Who gets to define what something means?
And who governs you in that space?
What changes if you enter the pause?
What changes if you stay there?
What changes if you allow yourself to consider —
even briefly —
that you may be wrong?
Is that weakness?
Or is that sovereignty?
*Angiogenesis—A blood clot can act as a physical or biological barrier that slows, disrupts, or dysregulates the process on angiogenesis [the formation of new blood vessels], assisting in blocking fuel or starving tumors of oxygen and nutrients needed to grow and metastasize.