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Good morning. Fifty years ago today, the Â鶹ԼÅÄ announced plans to begin broadcasting television programmes in colour.

Four hours a week of colour programmes started in the summer of the following year, with the first broadcast coming live from Wimbledon.  It seemed as though grass had never been so green!

The move from black and white to colour was initially quite disconcerting. My grandparents were the first in the family to invest in a new television, and I remember being astounded by the difference from our own black and white TV set.  I was also rather taken aback when I came to realise that while watching in black and white, my imagination had often supplied the colours – and often supplied them quite wrongly.

I think I always knew Andy Pandy’s stripy outfit was blue and white, but I’d assumed Looby Loo’s polka-dot skirt was red – not the navy it turned out to be.

It’s not easy to recognise where our assumptions are in error.

Sometimes we need to make the change from black and white to colour, so to speak, in order to see with greater clarity how things really are.

And when we don’t even realise how blind we are to what we fail to see, or see correctly, we may need some external influence to alert us to new perspectives.

The writer of the New Testament letter to the Ephesians encapsulates the necessity of this when he prays that ‘the eyes of our hearts may be opened’ – it’s about true perception on every level.

And even when we do see things in a new light, it can be quite a challenge to acknowledge, to ourselves and others, that our previous perspectives, and the consequences we drew from them, were misguided.

Loving God, where we are ignorant or in error, enlighten our understanding, and give us grace to follow as you guide us along the pathways of truth. Amen.