Welcome to Manna Not Mammon.
Today I want to talk about color.
Not color as decoration, or color as preference, but color as a way of seeing. Color as a language. Color as a gift that allows us to perceive the hidden architecture of life.
As a pathologist, I have spent much of my life looking at color under the microscope. The classic stain we use every day is called H&E, hematoxylin and eosin. Hematoxylin stains the nuclei of cells a deep blue-purple. Eosin stains the surrounding cytoplasm, connective tissue, muscle, and proteins in shades of pink, rose, and coral.
One of the first ways medical students learn this is with the image of a fried egg. The nucleus is the yolk. The cytoplasm is the white. It is simple, almost childlike, but it opens a door. Once those colors appear, tissue is no longer invisible. Architecture emerges. Pattern emerges. Disease becomes recognizable.
That was part of the genius of Paul Ehrlich in the late nineteenth century. Ehrlich and others realized that different cellular structures had different chemical affinities for dyes. Disease could be made visible because color could reveal what the eye could not otherwise see. Scientists experimented with textile dyes, plant pigments, and coal tar derivatives, and from that work came a visual language that transformed pathology, microbiology, hematology, and cytology.
A drop of blood, a lymph node aspirate, a thyroid specimen, a piece of tissue from the colon or prostate or breast could now speak through color. Inflammatory cells, bacteria, parasites, lymphoma, metastatic cancer, reactive change, dysplasia, malignancy — all of these could be recognized through shifts in hue, texture, architecture, and contrast.
Over time, the slide stops looking like just tissue. It begins to resemble landscapes, rivers, woven fabric, stained glass, or galaxies unfolding in purples, pinks, blues, and crimson.
That is where this became personal for me.
Before I ever looked through a microscope, I learned to enter color through Persian rugs.
My grandmother made a small prayer rug. My mother told me that she had helped bring carpet making to Naeen, a region of Iran later known for rugs of extraordinary delicacy. As a child, I did not understand the history inside that story. I only knew that Persian rugs felt alive.
They were not merely floor coverings. They were gateways into intricate worlds.
I remember looking into them as a little boy, following the vines, flowers, borders, medallions, leaves, and hidden paths. The colors seemed to come from the earth itself: indigo, ivory, walnut brown, madder red, saffron gold, faded rose, deep blue, and quiet green. They felt organic, as if garden, desert, mountain, and memory had all been gathered into wool.
And like children do, we imagined that if a rug were beautiful enough, finely made enough, almost perfect enough, it might lift from the floor and carry us somewhere else.
A Persian rug already feels halfway between earth and flight. It is made from wool, dye, hand, patience, and prayer, yet it opens into gardens, courtyards, rivers, stars, and faraway places. It teaches a child that beauty can be a doorway.
Only years later did I realize that the microscope had given me another way to travel into hidden worlds.
Under H&E stain, tissue is also woven. Glands form repeating fields. Collagen runs like threads. Blood vessels branch like vines. Nuclei gather in blue-purple knots. Cytoplasm spreads in rose and coral. Inflammation scatters like seeds. Normal tissue has rhythm, border, architecture, and balance. Disease interrupts the pattern. Cancer distorts the weave.
At this point, Psalm 139 comes into view, not as a quotation added from outside, but as the deep pattern underneath the whole image.
“For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
And then the line that now feels almost written for the microscope:
“My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”
The psalmist had no microscope, but he knew the body was not assembled like a machine. It was formed in secret. Knitted. Woven. Hidden from human sight, yet fully seen by God.
That is what the pathologist is allowed to glimpse.
The slide is not merely stained tissue. It is the hidden weaving of the body brought into color. Hematoxylin and eosin reveal what was once secret: the architecture of glands, vessels, fibers, membranes, and cells. The inward parts become visible. The woven world beneath the skin is brought to light.
And these colors carry an even older memory.
Long before purples, blues, crimsons, and rose tones appeared beneath the microscope, they moved through looms, temples, trade routes, priestly garments, royal courts, and sacred stories.
Purple dye was among the most prized substances in the ancient world. Tyrian purple came from Murex sea snails gathered along the Phoenician coast near Tyre and Sidon. Thousands of shells were required to produce a tiny amount of dye, making purple extraordinarily expensive and associated with royalty, nobility, and honor.
Phoenician merchants carried these dyes across the Mediterranean world. And one of the most memorable biblical figures connected to that world is Lydia of Thyatira.
Acts introduces her as a seller of purple, a woman of trade, craftsmanship, hospitality, and faith. Before Scripture tells us much about her theology, it gives us her world: color, commerce, textiles, beauty, and an open heart.
Scarlet and crimson carried their own sacred history. In the Hebrew Scriptures, scarlet thread and crimson dye appear in priestly garments, tabernacle curtains, purification rituals, covenant imagery, and sacrifice. The tabernacle itself was filled with blue, purple, scarlet, fine linen, and gold. These were not random colors. They were colors of worship, priesthood, sacrifice, cleansing, beauty, and divine presence.
Some crimson dyes were associated with the tola worm, whose vivid scarlet color became woven into Israel’s symbolic imagination. Psalm 22 uses that word in one of Scripture’s most haunting passages:
“But I am a worm, and no man;
a reproach of men, and despised of the people.”
The tola worm released its scarlet stain only through crushing. Fixed to the wood, it poured itself out until its life was spent, leaving behind the crimson thread from which the ancient dye was gathered.
Early Christians saw in the tola a living witness to the suffering Messiah, the One lifted up upon the wood, bearing the crushing weight of sin and pouring out His life so that others might be covered in mercy rather than shame.
Perhaps this is part of why these colors still carry such weight beneath the microscope.
Scarlet once marked priesthood, sacrifice, cleansing, covenant, and redemption. Purple once marked kingship and honor. Blue, crimson, gold, and fine linen filled the tabernacle. Persian rugs carried gardens, vines, rivers, and images of paradise into wool and silk. Psalm 139 spoke of the body as knitted and woven in secret.
And then the microscope, in its own quiet way, brings these worlds together.
The pathologist looks through the lens and sees tissue, but also pattern. Structure. Disorder. Repair. Beauty. Breakdown. Hidden architecture. A body fearfully and wonderfully made.
This is why color matters.
It lets us see.
It lets us diagnose.
It lets us remember.
Jesus once told His listeners to consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They do not toil or spin, and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
Maybe the microscope teaches us something similar. Even the smallest parts of us are clothed in unexpected splendor. The cell, the gland, the vessel, the fiber, the hidden inward part — all of it carries form, color, rhythm, and mystery.
Under the lens, the body becomes a woven world.
And the colors still whisper.
Kings and temples.
Priests and sacrifice.
Persian gardens and childhood wonder.
Blood and healing.
Life and death.
All quietly present in purple, crimson, blue, gold, rose, and coral beneath the microscope.
