Blue!

This scene is in Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind.

There is a scene in which a teacher [Elodin] explains to his student [Kvothe] that some things “cannot be described, only experienced and understood.”

“Can you describe all things you understand?” he [the teacher] looked sideways at me [the student].

“Of course.”

Elodin pointed down the street. “What color is that boy’s shirt?”

“Blue.”

“What do you mean by blue? Describe it.”

The student then failed to describe the color blue.

The teacher concluded, “Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating.” He lifted his hands high above his head as if streatching for the sky. “But there are other ways to understanding!” he shouted, laughing like a child. He threw both arms to the cloudless arch of sky above us, still laughing. “Look!” he shouted tilting his head back. “Blue! Blue! Blue!”

Fear Diminished By Experience

I was visiting a man as he lay dying, his death only a couple of days away. I asked him there at the end what he was feeling. Was he fearful?

“Fear? No,” he responded, “I’m not fearful because of my faith in Jesus.”

“We all have hope that our future is in God’s hands,” I said, somewhat piously.

“Well, I’m not hopeful because of what I believe about the future,” he corrected me, “I’m hopeful because of what I’ve experienced in the past.”

I asked him to say more.

“I look back over my life, all the mistakes I’ve made, all the times I’ve turned away from Jesus, gone my own way, strayed, and got lost. And time and again, he found a way to get to me, showed up and got me, looked for me when I wasn’t looking for him. I don’t think he’ll let something like my dying defeat his love for me.”

There was a man who understood Easter.

--Bishop William Willimon