Sketching in Pencil
We all start with a blank canvas. A canvas to dream, to create, to design, to draft, to envision, and to develop. A clean slate. A fresh start. A beginning. But it doesn’t take us long to mark that canvas up. To put lines, arrows, patterns, and circles. To leave dots, smears, specks, and marks. To make choices, decisions, impressions, and traces. To impact, influence, determine, and affect. One by one, the marks play into who you are, they determine who you are becoming, and they leave lasting transformations.
We all make marks with each thing we say, action we take, or thing we do. How we make our marks is the important part. Are we so set and confident in our own ways that we sketch in pen and take the control in our own hands? Do we sketch in pen or in pencil? Do we sketch, create and make marks with pencil so that we can develop our canvas with open hands? By doing this, we let the Lord come into our pencil sketches. We let Him come in with permanence and pen. We let him come in with beauty and color. He is creating a masterpiece. You see, the canvas of our life is His creation. It is His artwork. And as we make choices and steps forward and make our pencil sketches, the Lord is over us and in control making a beautiful piece of art.
We do have the choice to draw in pen ourselves. But all we end up doing with that is making permanent marks that may not be the best patterns for our life. When we do this, we hold God at a distance, and we take away from the best work that God intends for us. When we think we know how to design better than God does, we take what is not ours. We must remember that our canvas is His. When we realize that God knows the journey, the process, and what the final masterpiece will look like, we will always want to draw in pencil. As we sketch in pencil the Master Artist is painting. He is taking our sketches, our lines, our circles, and our marks, and forming something greater. A sketch is a personal creation that forms as it goes along. Sketches build on one another and mold and shape as they go. We do not know the finished picture. We just know how to sketch. So we need to keep sketching. Keep creating. And keep experiencing the Masterpiece we are becoming.
One of my favorite authors, Shauna Niequist writes a section in her book Cold Tangerines called “Writing in Pencil”. It is a great perspective of how we need to keep sketching on our canvas as our Master creates.
“I should have written in pencil. I should have viewed the trajectory of my life as a mystery or an unknown. I should have planned lightly, hypothetically, and should have used words like ‘ maybe’ and ‘possibly’. Instead, every chance I got, I wrote in stone and Sharpie. I stood on my future, on what I knew, on the certainty of what life would hold for me, as though it was a rock……the ground beneath my feet is lurching and breaking, making way for an entirely new thing every time I look down, surprised once again by a future I couldn’t have predicted…..At a certain point, I have to wonder about my judgement or my sanity. How can I continue knowing so definitively what the future will hold, and then being so totally wrong? This is my new thing: I am going to write in pencil.”
“Life with God at its core is about giving your life up to something bigger and more powerful. It’s about saying at every turn that God knows better than we know, and that his Spirit will lead us in ways that we couldn’t have predicted.”
“Everything is interim…..Every season that I thought was stable and would be just how it was for a long time ended up being a preparation or path to the next thing. When you decide to take this journey with God, everything is interim……Everything is interim. Everything is a path or a preparation for the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is…..life with God is a daring dream, full of flashes and last minute exits and generally all the things we’ve said we’ll never do. And with the surprises comes great hope.”
“That’s what I want. I want to arrive. I want to get to wherever I am going and stay there. That’s why I was such a ferocious planner of my life. But I’m learning to just keep moving, keep walking, keep taking teeny tiny steps. And it’s in those teeny tiny steps and moments that I become, actually, who I am. We won’t arrive. But we can become. And that’s the most hopeful thing I can think of. Thank God I was wrong about everything I had planned. Thank God we weren’t on my schedule, because even though I dragged my heels and checked my planner every five seconds while I watched my life change in His hands, I really like the place we’ve ended up, and the things I’ve seen along the way.”
If you find that you have been sketching in pen and it has left a mark, your canvas isn’t ruined. No matter what has happened, Christ can come in and transform your life. He can paint over any stain or blemish we have left. There is nothing that is too stained for Him to make beautiful. We just have to be willing to give up the pen and take up a pencil. But we have to take it up. We have to sketch. We can sketch, we can create in pencil, and we can draft. And of course with pencil you can still make mistakes, but with pencil those mistakes can be converted into Christ’s final work as he uses color and beauty and purpose to create His masterpiece. He will use our rough sketches, all our scribbles, erase marks, even the mistakes and the rips in our sketch paper to form the uniquely designed workmanship that is you.
“We are God’s MASTERPIECE (His workmanship), created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” Eph 2:10
As you sketch, you can begin to find God’s design for your family, God’s purpose for marriage, and God’s creativity in your family life. Try to take up your pencil and begin to sketch with a new sense of urgency, a new passion, a new hope, a deeper desire to take risks, and a firmer conviction to trust the one who made you. Trust the one who is the master artist, the God who created you and is painting His masterpiece in and through your life. God will paint His masterpiece through your life and this will have a lasting beneficial impact on your family. As you sketch, learn, respond, and grow, God will continue to create. So respond to Him and allow yourself to be designed with His purpose.
So how are you going to make your marks? Can you trust God to create His beautiful masterpiece for your family?
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