Kathleen Ditmore, wonderful sister and friend.
I’ve always struggled with the big picture. I’m a details sort of girl. I’m not good at picking vacation spots, but once someone makes the call I’m the one that organizes it down to the final check mark. I am good at details, but honestly the view from the detail seats is pretty limited. I see only what is in front of me. So if problems are in front of me, there are only problems. If obstacles are in front of me then all I see are obstacles. It can make life overwhelming to say the least. This line of thinking reminds me of the expression “The devil is in the details”. I believe that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to just throw up my hands in sheer frustration when confronted by long list of details that must be considered in order for a plan to go forward.
When I think of details I’m reminded of paint by number kits. I can remember getting those as a child and then having to figure out which number corresponded to which color. I would then spend painstaking hours filling in all the 4’s with navy and the 2’s with yellow. Slowly and a bit sloppily, a picture would eventually appear. It wasn’t until it was finished that I could actually see where I had made my mistakes, but those were usually fairly easy to correct. Sometimes I chose not to correct it. I liked it better a little different from the image on the box. I could stand back and look at it. I could see the big picture comprised of a thousand little details.
I think that is what is missing at times from my life. I just don’t step back and look at the big picture. I get hung up on all the details. I get too focused on trying to make my life look like the picture on the box. The picture on the box is just the example. It has nothing to do with how my life should look. For a detail person, like myself, that thought is a little frightening. How could I possibly know if I’m getting it right or wrong, if I don’t have some guidelines to compare my life with, how do I know if I’m on track? I wondered around asking myself this question for years until I finally realized that being on track is less about the detail concept of rules and instead more about the big picture concept of faith.
Don’t get scared and click off, running from a religious fanatic, I’m not a Bible thumper, well, not anymore. No, I am done with rigid religion and manmade denominational rules. I still believe in God minus all the made up control bullshit. I look at the big picture of Christ or Buddha or well, insert the prophet of your choice here. Unlike in my day to day “to do list” list, I don’t get bogged down in the detail of my faith, I don’t waste a lot of time trying to follow every conflicting rule. I’m not deluded into believing that I can ever get it all right or be perfect. In fact, Jesus said for me to come to him like a child. Well then, how could I have ever believed that God expects perfection if He asked me to come as a child. Children make messes, they fall down, they ask silly questions, and they tear their clothing, and occasionally spill their milk. They say the wrong things for the right reasons. Children are imperfect and I’m a child of God. Seeing this big picture has made my life a lot easier. That old Bible thumper I alluded to above, she was very much lost in the details and missing the point.
It was during those years of perfecting myself and my faith that I felt pressure from religion. At twenty I truly bought into that crap, I believed that if I tried hard enough that in time I would reach the point of perfect faith. Now at 44 I know perfection is impossible. Luckily, I have also come to understand that God never expected perfection, man demands perfection, God adores the imperfect, the unique, and the flawed. God adores me. Yep, the woman who forgets to say her prayers, who eats steak from time to time when there are hungry people in this world, who wears green with blue and overprotects everyone she loves. Yep, God loves me. Why? There is no why. That is the biggest trick of all. We spend our lives asking why but there is no why. It just is. He just is. Life just is. It isn’t about understanding any of it. It is about living it.
I think that God is in the details and God is in the big picture. God is in all of it. In the midst of my detail driven insanity, God pulls me out of my chair and asks me to open my eyes and see the big picture. The colorful, textured, vibrant portrait of my life, it isn’t perfect. It isn’t even close. It’s obvious when I look at it that I used some green where the yellow was supposed to go, the red isn’t quite right and the white and black are far too close together, but that’s okay. I’m okay. “Life like drawing is a series of corrections”, according to my sister and I believe that is true. I’m a process and this is my masterpiece, fully imperfect, and fully alive. I don’t look like the picture on the box and that is a very good thing.
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