Coloring Outside the Lines

I’m an artist. But I’m not an artist in the visual sense. I’ve never been able to draw well, and I was never big on art class in school because the stuff I made was all horrible compared to the people sitting next to me.

Like almost all kids, crayons and coloring books were a staple of my entertainment–the thing I did when I was supposed to be “quiet.” I’m not gonna say I didn’t enjoy coloring a little bit–I was especially proud of my gillion-color special super-duper Crayola set with names of colors I was too young to pronounce–but there was a problem.

I found myself utterly incapable of coloring inside the lines.

As a kid, it was kind of embarrassing. Especially if I was coloring in a group and the girl sitting across from me happened to be cute. She’d be coloring a princess or a unicorn or something, all with perfect shading, all perfectly inside the lines. And she’d look at my sloppily-colored horse or elephant or whatever, and say, “Why don’t you color inside the lines?”

I couldn’t answer that question. It wasn’t for lack of trying. My hands just weren’t that steady. Or maybe I just wasn’t interested enough to apply so much energy to something so meticulous. Whatever the reason, it remained a point of frustration, one more thing that set me apart from the cool kids or the cute girls.

I confess this not with a huge sense of scarring–sometimes a crayon is just a crayon–but because looking back, I see it as a metaphor. Coloring inside the lines for me represents thriving from within the system. I couldn’t color inside the lines in a coloring book, but somewhere along the way I made the decision that I was going to try to stay inside the lines in every other aspect of my life. I tried to become a perfect rule-keeper. In every situation I was in, I learned the “rules” (both spoken and unspoken) and tried to gain favor by being a “good boy.” I strove to be the teacher’s pet in every class I attended. I tried to be the model Christian in my youth group. I surmised that the way to get ahead was to follow the rules laid out for me by whatever person or group was in charge of that system, in order to gain favor.

It worked–but only to a point. As I went along thinking this way, I came to realize two very disturbing things:

First–in many “systems” where I strove to keep the rules (whether it be a job, or church, or whatever), it turned out the rules were not actually a way to make it to the top, but rather a way to keep you under control. Rule-keeping did not always lead to advancement. In some cases, it only led to keeping the guy in charge happy, well-fed, etc., and keeping you out of trouble.

Second–try as I might, I still was not capable of coloring inside the lines. Not fully.

It turns out that my sense of justice often got in the way of my attempt to “go along to get along.” This was particularly the case in church circles. I wanted to be the good kid, but somehow or other I always ended up being something of a troublemaker. My sense of idealism about what the church should be always ended up clashing with what the church actually was, and more often than not I found myself pointing out the difference–and to my dismay, I discovered that people didn’t take kindly to being confronted with these discrepancies. On a few occasions, the church leadership (even some of the abusive ones), to their credit, would take the heat for me, defend me, let me have my head. Other times–such as when I went as a guest at another church–I just wouldn’t get invited back. And when I was a church leader myself, it eventually came to a head when I was publicly accosted by another leader whose territory I was obviously threatening.

I never wanted to be the “Wayward Son.” This was not something I aspired to. I wanted to be the favorite. And I certainly could have made things easier on myself if I had just been willing to “play ball.” But I was no better at playing ball than I was at coloring, and I now think playing ball by their rules would ultimately have capped my potential. I had already seen the beginnings of this at the church I left behind.

So…try as I might, I still couldn’t color inside the lines. And what little success I had with coloring inside the lines didn’t seem to lead to much reward. So eventually I did the same thing I had done as a child when coloring got to be too much for me: I stopped trying.

I put the coloring book away.

I’m not trying to suggest that there are no legitimate rules, or that boundaries aren’t important. I hope I’m not conveying that. Boundaries are important. You don’t just color on anything, for example. But I’ve learned that there are a lot of boundaries and rules that man imposes on us that have nothing to do with being “good.” There are lots of protocols (read: politics) in modern church structures that have nothing to do with the Bible. Coloring books are nothing more than someone else’s drawing–man-made boundaries that we’re supposed to stay within. But who is to say we couldn’t make a better drawing from our own imagination?

All of this is metaphor, of course. Like I said, I actually can’t draw worth a darn. But in other parts of life, I am learning that the boundaries God sets and the boundaries man sets are quite often two different things. I still want to be good in the things that matter, but I’ve given up on measuring my own worth by how well I stay inside the man-made lines.

True art doesn’t come from a coloring book, after all. Just saying.