I usually find myself saying that with age comes wisdom. It makes perfect sense when you consider all of the life experiences we have to learn from. Well, that saying was just blown away by a five-year-old! 

Robert and I took a road trip to meet the gentleman that has helped me with all of my websites and technical knowledge. It was a real joy to meet him and his wife in person. I had been working with him for three years through e-mails and phone conversations. As part of our trip, we visited Robert’s son and two grandchildren.

Our visit was filled with fun activities like a trip to the zoo, botanical garden, history Museum, playing on playgrounds and coloring in coloring books.

Helen is five years old and was my coloring partner.

We sat down at the kitchen table each having our own coloring book. Also on the table were two big, glass jars filled with markers of various colors. The book I had was on butterflies. On the front inside cover and back inside cover were the pictures of completed, colored illustrations of each page of butterflies in the book. When I saw this I wisely told Helen, “Look, they have the pictures of the butterflies and how they are supposed to look. You can look at the picture and then color the butterfly to match what they show.”

Helen’s reply to me was, “Oh, no. You don’t have to color the butterflies like the picture. You can color them any way you want.”

Now I know why Jesus loves the little children! When he was asked by the disciples in Matthew, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?,” he called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

What a simple and powerful nugget of wisdom. So, I did exactly what Helen said. I colored my butterfly any color I wanted. I created a butterfly masterpiece. If I had copied the picture from the front of the book, it still would have been beautiful, but it wouldn’t have been uniquely mine.

How often do we do things just because, well, it’s the way we do things? Perhaps we can pause from our auto pilot way of thinking and look at some areas in our lives differently.

While I have done pretty well in trading the “what I should do” in life to the “what I choose to do” in life, Helen opened my eyes to new possibilities in creativity. So, with age can come wisdom, but let’s appreciate the wisdom of children.

May you color your world with new possibilities and live without limits.

Until next time…

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