In Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book by Shel Silverstein, the letter “I” appears. In case you don’t know, Uncle Shelby is not fond of children and his book really isn’t for children, unless you are interested in having them bury the car keys, throw eggs around, and pull their own teeth out for the money. In any case, “I is for ink. Ink is black. Ink is wet. What can we do with ink? Dr___”

Ah that Uncle Shelby, what a kidder. I was thinking about this the other day because, of all things, I’d met someone named Lydia. It’s hard for some of us who know bible names well to not think about the stories or associations with bible events when we hear certain ones. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Elijah, Amos, Jonah, and so on. You get the idea. Well, how many Lydias do you know? Or Tabithas? Or Dorcas? Or Festus?

It doesn’t help that some of these names are, shall we say, unique. Being unique, and uncommon, they can be either a curse or a blessing to the person who has them. Myself, I had never met a Shelby before… about this time last year. And it was always UNCLE Shelby, thank you, so for a gal to show up with the same name, well, old ways of thinking die hard.

But it was the purple that I was focused on. It got me to thinking about ink, and I remembered back to when I was in school and in a chemistry class where we took a long, close look at the stuff. What is black ink made of? Well, using a 19 cent Bic (remember those?) we drained the thing and separated it into colors. Yes, there was some black, surprisingly a *very* small amount of it. There was also blue, and green. But red! Over half just red ink. Yet apparently the black is so overpowering that even though the majority was another color, black trumps all.

And folks are like that. They are made up of a bunch of different things. Sometimes we are silly, sometimes serious. Maybe a bit rash, or very careful. I know some folks joke around their troubles, others wallow in it. This is what we see, but if we could extract what’s inside, the spiritual portion, I wonder what we’d find?

Maybe lots of good – maybe “mostly” good. But how much bad does it really take before no one notices the good anymore, because that little bit of blackness overpowers all that good? Our worldly friends like to believe there is this great scale, that all our good is put on one side and all out bad put on the other and we are judged out of “fairness.” I guess that’s an OK comparison – as long as all the “bricks” on the good side are made of styrofoam and the bricks on the bad side are solid lead. Yeah, that seems about right. Even if this were the case, it’s hardly fair. No one would ever come out on the good side, there’s just too much bad in us to ever outweigh the good – unless there’s more to it…

And thankfully there is. When we become a child of God, and when we continue to walk in the light, it’s as if someone were constantly removing those lead bricks from the “bad” side – perhaps to make pencils with. It’s still not “fair” – Jesus had to die. But ink stains are hard to get out, aren’t they? And for our sins – our blackness and stains - Jesus wore a robe of scarlet. Its as if in spite of an ocean of darkness, regardless of the proportions, his blood was more than enough to, in the end, leave satan only seeing red.

Randy