Monochrome journey in a weirdly coloured world

Imagine for a moment that everything you see close to is rendered in monochrome. Greyscale is the palette of your immediate perception, though you do admit to an underlying tendency to black and white views. The world beyond your  touch is in colour, but as you can see, not accurate colour; the spectrum is shifted, distorted, grainy, weird. It all makes sense of course to you. You can relate and navigate by what you see. Your worldview is coherent, sensible even. And because this is your normality, you are not even aware that you are on a monochrome journey in a weirdly coloured world.

Insight and perception mattered to Jesus. So much of his time in the gospels seems to be spent encountering the perpetrators and victims of  faulty seeing and mis-perception, and countering its insidious effects.  Through his eyes we see and perceive the world and each other very differently. The colours of love are within reach and we are in touch with the brilliant spectrum of grace which frees and liberates. Our distant vision is transformed by the godly spectrum of inclusive, rainbow colour. We are placed at one with what we see, the world and everything in it.

This line of thinking has been triggered by PamBG's recent posts and comments in the 'methblogosphere' around the subject of 'Masculine Christianity'. Pam's comment on my 'Ad-Mission...' post took me quite by surprise and was an interpretation of my outlook that I had not seen coming, nor would I ever see. The viewpoint Pam describes horrifies me and bears no relation whatsoever to what was in my mind when I wrote about 'full-strength, unfiltered, Wild Christianity':

Yeah, the problem is that I reckon 'Unfiltered wild Christianity' means different things to different people.
When I hear that particular soundbite, I think Mark Driscoll, macho Christianity, women are crap and should be seen and not heard, let's go shoot some deer and proclaim a triumphalist Christianity, us good, you bad, us heaven, you hell, let's slap some people about in the name of God.

Insight and perception; seeing and not-seeing; being sensitively aware of other ways of seeing, and especially of being seen / unseen, really matters. We should be grateful to Pam for this wake-up call. Prejudice and hurtful ways of seeing are all too prevalent. There are far too many women who have been and are being hurt in the church. An integral part of our calling as disciples is to have the courage to say that we see things differently. To be willing to flag up crucial differences of insight and perception. Then we might hear Jesus whisper in our ear: 'but blessed are your eyes, for they see.'