Dot-to-Dot Discipleship

Dot-to-Dot Discipleship

When I was a kid the worst part of a rainy afternoon wasn’t the rain. It was the dot-to-dot page my mom handed me, copied on a church library mimeograph machine, with the numbers already half-rubbed off and the instruction “connect the dots and see the picture.” Maybe you too? Easy enough if you could still make out the 1, the 2, the 3. Absolute nonsense if the numbering system had vanished and all you had was a field of anonymous black spots. You’d draw a few lines in, decide the thing was probably a duck or a tractor, get bored, and wander off to do something more productive, like stare at the wall.

Scripture reading is that page, except the dots are scattered across centuries, the numbering system is mostly implied, and the picture is not a duck. It is the actual point of the whole exercise. And you are not allowed to see the finished drawing first.

That last part is the real problem. In the children’s version you at least know there "is" a picture and that the numbers will eventually produce it if you stay with them. With the scriptures you are frequently told, by people who have already finished their own drawing, that the picture is obvious and you are either spiritually lazy or willfully rebellious for not seeing it yet. Meanwhile the dots keep showing up out of order. A verse in Isaiah talks like it belongs next to something Nephi is about to say, except Nephi hasn’t said it yet and you are reading them in different books on different days. A covenant promise made to one people under one set of conditions reappears centuries later under completely different conditions, and you are supposed to decide whether the line still connects or whether someone has just drawn a convenient shortcut. Present-day application is worse. You can usually manage to link an ancient warning to its own historical moment. Linking it to last Tuesday’s news without forcing the geometry is harder, and the temptation to force it is strong.

So a lot of people do what I did with the faded dot-to-dot page. They connect a few obvious nearby points, announce that the picture is a duck (or a tractor, or “personal spiritual growth,” or “the Church is true and that’s the end of the matter”), and then stop. Or they decide the page is defective and walk away. Both responses are understandable. Neither one produces the picture the dots were actually laid out to form.

The numbering system, such as it is, is not printed in bold at the top of the page. It lives in the patterns the earlier writers themselves used when they quoted still-earlier writers. It lives in the repeated covenant language, the types that keep showing up, the warnings that keep being ignored in roughly the same sequence. It also lives, inconveniently, in the requirement that you keep drawing provisional lines long after you would rather be done. Some of those lines will have to be erased later. That is not a bug. That is how you avoid ending up with a confident drawing of a duck when the dots were always going to resolve into something else.

Most of us were not taught to treat the scriptures this way. We were taught to treat them as a collection of already-numbered, already-connected moral illustrations, or as a set of proof-texts for conclusions reached before we opened the book. Both approaches save time. Both also guarantee you will never see anything the official picture didn’t already include. The actual work is slower and less flattering. You sit with a lot of isolated dots. You notice that certain ones keep wanting to link across large gaps of time. You test the line. You ask whether it still holds when you try to run it all the way to the present without snapping it. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. The picture emerges anyway, usually later than you wanted and rarely in the shape you expected.

If that sounds like more trouble than it is worth, the rainy-afternoon version of you would agree. The alternative is to keep insisting the dots are random or that someone else has already finished the drawing for you. Either way you’ll end up staring at the wall. The other option is less tidy and takes longer: you pick up the pencil, accept that some lines will have to be redrawn, and keep connecting the dots until the picture actually starts to appear.

Signed

—John The-Not-So-Beloved