Doodles

I'm a world class doodler. I'm not bragging; it's just true. There's the average doodler, and then there is me.

Unfortunately for me, most of my elementary school teachers didn't see it that way. They saw it as evidence of my spacing out in class...which was probably true, but entirely beside the point. They missed the ART in my twirls and wiggles; they missed my self-expression.

The understanding teachers just ignored the marks I made on the margins. The "others" (as I like to call them) were annoyed to no end by my self-expression on the edges of my papers. I'm happy to report that I have fully recovered from the emotional scars they left.

But some people, they spend their life on the margins. Every mark they make on the world is, at best, ignored and at worst disdained.

I have what the professionals call ODSOJ - what is commonly referred to by lay people as an over developed sense of justice. So, as I watched the opening ceremony for the summer Olympics I couldn't help being distracted by all the money they spent on the production. I happen to have reliable first hand accounts of the orphan situation in China. There are so many abandoned children it's hard to wrap my brain around the numbers. And these little girls and boys live in squalor. Most of them have no hope of escape. They will grow up in institutions. Some will live their entire lives in institutions.

They are on the margins. Ignored. Disdained.

The inherent beauty and value in their lives will never be appreciated. They will never be seen. Never valued. Never loved.

And so many times their souls shrivel up like a little rose blossoms cut too early from the bush. What could have been lovely, what had the potential for beauty, never became.

Never becomes.

And the margins become dark and bitter. It's so hard to find loveliness there.

But it's there. There in the margins is a child, or a woman or an elderly person valued by God and beautiful in their own right.

If only...