We yelled it right before being tagged “it” when I was a kid. It was from free ticket that could be used once each game. But it could only be used once, after that, you were on your own to wriggle away from the person who was “it” and trying to tag you out of the game!

I talk about this, and how we so often use it with God in areas of our lives today, in my weekly Heartlight.org post — Christ in the House. We yell “King’s X” to go in those places of our lives we don’t want to yield to the Lordship of Christ, that we keep secret from others, or even in areas we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we have issues.

I finished the post with these words:

Let’s get real about the places we’ve declared “King’s X” to His Lordship and surrender them. Let’s invite Him in to be Lord of every relationship, meal, and conversation. When this happens, there will be no doubt that Christ is Lord in our house!

Where have you declared “King’s X” with Jesus?

Have you been honest with yourself about that?

What do you need to do to yield to the Lordship of Christ in your life?

Finally, how do yield those “King’s X” areas of your heart to God?

I’d love to get your responses below!

Why is it so hard to be a church that is committed to reach “ALL” people?

How can we as believers reach out to “ALL” and not just to people just like us?

How can we learn to love the people of our city more and include them in Jesus’ circle of grace?

(Please share your responses below — don’t forget to put in the number code or the responses won’t post! Thanks.)

Color, for some of us, is everything. For others, like a good friend of mine I work with, color is a mystery — he is absolutely color blind. I’m not sure how I would make it in such a world. I love the artistic use of b/w photography. This brings out elements and lines and mysteries I don’t see in color. But, to live without color always, would be hard to imagine.

As much as I would like to think that color is an individual, preference sort of thing, colors change us, move us, and touch us in ways that similar and yet uniquely distinct. So there are color palettes. God gave us the rainbow. Artists work within, or intentionally defy, acceptable color palettes. Some of us just goober up the canvas, interior design, website, or whatever medium we defile, because we pay no attention to color palettes.

So to the rescue comes the kuhl kuler website, http://kuler.adobe.com/ that helps us all, skilled and neophyte, get the color thing dialed in … or at least have a clue when we’re out of whack with the rest of eyes on the planet.

Enjoy … play … and use. Be kuhl, and even kuhler!

Being kuhl today is part of Randy Elrod’s WaterCoolerWednesday, join in the kuler celebration!

On Sunday morning, however, about ten minutes into my sermon, an image flashed on the screen of some of the children I had been with in Uganda. Then the picture, the little girl we sponsor flashed on the screen. In a very public situation, and without warning, all the emotions, exhaustion, cultural differences, and jet lag hit all at once. I wrestled to gather my emotions, my voice pushed by will through clenched vocal chords tangled by emotions. The carefully prepared outline of a message suddenly scrambled in my head as my thoughts wrestled with the emotions of my heart. By the grace of God, I got through it without a total meltdown. However, some things slipped out in ways that I wouldn’t have said them under different circumstances. Carefully crafted points suddenly became fuzzily entangled in the moment.

When I sat down with ministry staff and several elders months earlier to speak on the topic, “Unto the Least of These,” I had no idea I was going to Uganda to be with children, and especially this one special child, whose smiles would be indelibly written on the canvas of my heart. But I had gotten through the message … in the first service! Somehow, the Holy Spirit was going to have to pick me up and kick me in the backside and help me through another one.

Before I made it home from that Sunday morning, Megan (our daughter) and I picked up Donna at the airport. She was coming in from a speaking engagement in Alabama with her friends, The Coffee Group. They were excited and tired and glad to be home, but feeling good about their weekend with their sisters in Christ from Homewood. I was excited to be with her and we were both glad to get home and be together.

On the way into the house, there on the counter, was a simple vase filled with white roses. They looked great except for one wilted set of leaves. I had sent them to her for Valentines’ Day, along with red and pink roses — two dozen in all. Somehow the white ones had hung on for nearly two weeks and still looked good, but all the other roses with color had wilted. I had culled out the wilted roses, and left behind the white ones. It was a little thing, but something I knew Donna would notice as a simple way to say, “Glad you are home! I love you!”

As I looked at those roses, that’s how I felt. Glad to be home and loved, but drained of color and wilted on the edges.

My blogging buddies — it is unbelievably cool to think of these incredible people as my buddies connected at the heart through the children of Uganda — have been discussing the challenge we have faced the last few days of speaking about this event. We want to share what we feel, but our feelings are too deep to communicate without tears and laughter. We are not sad, we are just deeply changed. For awhile, as we regain our balance, we are wilted roses. But unlike the roses I culled to leave only the nice looking white ones for Donna to see, we will regain our color and lose our wilt. We have experienced something we don’t want to forget and have been touched by children whom we can’t forget.