The Day the Crayons Found Grace

“January was a tough year, but we made it.”

I do feel as if I’m rolling into February on two wheels, and I know I’m not alone. Every young family I know, from friends in our Austin neighborhood to my twin brother’s crew over in Georgia, has been absolutely wrecked by sickness over the past few weeks. Whether it’s the flu, a nasty norovirus, strep, Covid, pneumonia, or a ghastly combination of the above – it feels like we’re all just walking wounded. Still feeling like puffy little Teletubbies from recent Christmas indulgences, we’ve got crumpled tissues wedged in couch cushions, thermometers abandoned on nightstands, the hum of humidifiers going in every room, and a general sense that time itself has been lost to an endless loop of fevers, Motrin administrations, coughs, breathing treatments, and laundry. Oh, and some snow days thrown in there, too. Our family has been held together by popsicle baths, Cocomelon, and Bluey, limping toward bedtime each night.

And yet, glory in the ordinary brought such a sweet parallel for me the other night when my daughter selected her bedtime read from her bookshelf and plopped The Day The Crayons Came Home in my lap. The narrative unfolds through a series of postcards written by crayons who have been misplaced by their owner, a boy named Duncan. Each crayon shares its tale of woe: Marooned Crayon, forgotten in the couch, sat on, and broken in half (now held together only by Paper Clip); Neon Red, abandoned at a hotel pool; Orange and Yellow, melted together after being left outside in the sun; Burnt Sienna, chewed up by the dog and later puked onto the living room rug; Turquoise, left in Duncan’s pocket only to be found fused to a sock in the dryer. Running through each letter is the same longing and earnest plea — to be remembered, to be brought home.

So what does this young boy do with these ragamuffin crayons who are “so damaged and differently shaped than they used to be that they no longer fit” in their original box?

Duncan doesn’t throw them away for being too broken, too used up. He doesn’t get the ick at their misshapen form or ignore their requests or needs. Instead, he runs around seeking them out, collecting them, taking in their bruises and scars and idiosyncrasies and builds them something new: an epic crayon fort fashioned out of cardboard boxes, toilet paper rolls, scissors, and tape, a home where the stubbiest, melted-down, and chewed-up crayons are fully welcomed and seen. Marooned Crayon comments to Gold as he gazes up at their new home: “I think everyone is welcome.” Orange and Red crayons take in the “Big Door” cut perfectly into the side of the box, noting its ideal size to accommodate their unusual width as a fused pair: “I think that door is for us!” Burnt Sienna abides safely in a toilet paper roll balcony at the top of the fort, well out of the dog’s reach. But most notably, childish scribbles on the side of the box proclaim colorfully in all caps: ALL CRAYONS WELCOME.

Sounds a lot like church to me.

One of the great privileges of being a clergy spouse is that I am, indeed, at church nearly every Sunday — barring fevers or puke situations. Church is simply our thing. By physically sliding into the pew every week, lingering at coffee hour, chatting with families as our kids run around the courtyard, or nursing the baby in the cry room with another young mother, I catch glimpses of both the color and the brokenness around me. Sometimes, I look into the faces of our parish – turned towards the altar or lowered in prayer – and I get weepy. Because I know their pain, and I sit with them in its weight. By virtue of being part of their church family, part of the same Crayola box, I know whose husband is having hip surgery at the end of the month. I know the son who got a DUI last weekend and feels like his life is over. I know about the drawn-out divorce, the anniversary of the boy who died by suicide, the diagnosis, the loss, the fractured relationship, the bullying, the cycle of infertility, the blue Christmas she had. But just as I see them, I am seen, too. When I’ve shown up in tears having just screamed at my children in the car over their bickering and sass, someone reaches for the baby and hands me a cup of coffee. When I shared the grief of leaving the classroom after fifteen years of teaching, a flower arrangement appeared on my doorstep. When we lost our dog, three people gifted us a copy of Dog Heaven.

In all of this, we are merely a collection of broken crayons — worn down, mismatched, stubby riffraff barely being held together– longing to be welcomed home. And the gift of grace is this: God isn’t waiting for us to put ourselves back together before ushering us into his kingdom. He’s not sitting at the right hand of the father, expecting us to sharpen up, get fresh, and prove useful before welcoming us in. He takes us as we are — half-melted, paper peeling, smelling vaguely of dog or kid vomit– and makes us a home not in spite of our brokenness, but through it.

Even now, as our edges crumble and our labels fade, God’s hands are at work, melting away the layers of wax skin we mistook for our truest selves, making us new. And what remains is not less but more — more beauty, more truth, more light: more like the men and women he created us to be. God welcomes us not because we are lovely — indeed, the perfect crayons have no need of Duncan’s fort — but in order to make us more lovely than we could have imagined possible. January might have been a tough year, and we might have only held it together with popsicle baths, Cocomelon, and Bluey, but God seeks the humbled, the afflicted, and the desperate. In him, all lost crayons of this world find a place where they belong.