Dressed for the Calling

📖 "**But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light.**" — 1 Peter 2:9 (NKJV)

🕯️ I've been thinking about colour.

Not in an abstract, artistic sort of way — though, knowing me, it was never going to stay purely practical for long. I mean colour as identity. Colour as courage. Colour as the very visible declaration of who you are and Whose you are.

It started with the photographer's suggestion to wear neutral colours for the Mini-TENx speakers — and I'll be honest with you, something in me quietly bristled. Neutral colours. For a talk about healing 💔heARTs💖. For a message that has cost me something real to carry. For a moment I've spent years walking toward.

✍️ I wrote my objection into the chat — gently, I hope, though perhaps with a sparkle in my eye — and it turned out I wasn't the only one who felt it. One by one, the other speakers shifted to bright, bold colours. Peter Mancer noticed. Even Katharina, with her photographer's eye, weighed in: "How you dress is so connected to personality... you gotta feel comfy." She was right. She is right.

🕊️ Comfy, yes. Settled in your own skin, yes. Dressed in the colours of who you actually are — absolutely yes.

Here's what I've come to know, after all these years of healing work and paint-splattered studio floors and conversations that go deep before the first cup of tea is finished: neutrals are safe. Neutrals blend in. Neutrals don't ask the room to take a second look. There is a place for that — a beautiful, restful place — but it is not the place for someone stepping up to proclaim what God has done. Not for a woman who has been brought out of darkness into His marvellous light.

🪨 Light is not neutral. The light Peter writes about — that marvellous light — is the light that floods a room and makes people reach for their sunglasses. It is the kind of light that exposes and heals and calls forth all at once. It is the light of resurrection. The light of a life that has been broken and then, breathtakingly, restored with gold.

I keep coming back to kintsugi. That Japanese art of mending shattered pottery with gold — not hiding the cracks, but honouring them, gilding them, making the broken places the most luminous parts of the vessel. I am that pottery. You are that pottery. Our stories, the ones we sometimes want to keep wrapped in safe, muted tones, are precisely the places where the gold has been poured in. To stand up and speak in a washed-out palette would be to say, with my very clothing, that I'm still trying to hide.

📖 "**You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.**" — Matthew 5:14 (NKJV)

🌱 I wore bright. I wore bold. I wore the colours that say: I know who I am. I know what I've been through. I know what my God has done — and I am not here to blend into the background.

That small, cheerful act of choosing colour felt, in its own quiet way, like worship. Like obedience. Like putting on the garments of praise instead of a spirit of heaviness.

🕯️ I wonder sometimes whether we do this in subtler ways — whether we reach for the spiritual equivalent of neutrals when God is asking us to stand in the bold brightness of what He's written over our lives. Whether we mute our testimony to avoid taking up too much space. Whether we speak more quietly than the truth inside us deserves.

Let this be a gentle reminder to both of us, beloved: you were not made to blend in. You were called out of darkness into marvellous light — and marvellous light is meant to be seen.