Doodles

I like to doodle. I can’t quite bring myself to calling what I do drawing or sketching, and it’s certainly not art. You see, I’m not very good at it but I like to pass the time by marking up pieces of paper with a pencil, or doodling. My notebooks in school were filled with all sorts of doodles. The margins on a piece of foolscap was where I made my notes and the main body of the page was a canvas upon which all manner of unlikely creature dwelt.

You see, the problem I think is that I can doodle a reasonable looking thing – a table looks like a table, a tree like a tree, a person like a person. I can even doodle a hand – generally agreed to be a difficult feat, if you’ll pardon a pun.

But the hand I doodle doesn’t quite match the body, and the body doesn’t quite match the head, and so on. I somehow focus so much on the getting the thing I’m drawing right that it doesn’t match the rest of the doodle. In other words, I loose perspective. I lose sight of the bigger picture. Things are – out of whack.

Life can be like that too. We can focus so intently on one part of our life that we loose perspective of the whole of our life. Just like in doodling, we need to, from time to time, step back and see the bigger picture – to take a look at what’s out of whack. And then we are free to correct things.

For me, two things are helpful for regaining perspective. One is prayer. When I pray regularly I can, eventually, see things more clearly and am able to deal with what needs dealing with. The other is community. Being with other people helps me to see that all parts of the doodle need to be in relationship with one another. All parts of our lives are in relationship. Together we can pray and be in relationship in a way that helps our doodles be right. Each one of our doodles is art and each one is proudly displayed on God’s fridge.