Preserving white space fosters beauty
I am an artist. Precisely, I am a watercolor artist – not a painter of oils or acrylics, but watercolors only, baby! They fit me.
Let me explain. Oil painters generally strive for perfection, paint over mistakes, get it right. Oil paint dries slowly so you can rework a painting for months. Not so with watercolors.
A watercolor artist must be impetuous, cough it out there, get it done. 
The painting is ruined if it is overworked. Painting with watercolors is not about control, it is about taking risks from your gut, causing paints to mix and swirl in ways that you could never plan but that take your breath away.
However, the exquisite irony is: a watercolor painting must be carefully planned and laid out in the artist’s mind before the brush ever touches the page for the purpose of preserving the white space.
The white space is the part of the page that shuns color. For example, a white picket fence in front of a dense green forest cannot be added later with white paint layered over the green. White paint does not exist on the watercolorist’s pallet.
Each picket of that white fence in the foreground must be carefully preserved as white paper as the forest is painted behind and between each picket.
See, the secret beauty of a watercolor painting is in the white space, which sets off the colors and the images of the rest of the painting. The great challenge of being a watercolor artist is even though we are spontaneous by nature, the white space must be carefully planned for at the outset and preserved at all costs.
Therein also lies the challenge in living a full and colorful life. The metaphorical white space of our living is “down time”; it is time with the computer and the cell phone turned off. It is front porch swing time; it is sitting quietly in prayer or meditation. It is those nourishing slices of still life when God may choose to be heard.
As John Prine sings, preserving the white space is “blowing up the T.V., moving to the country, planting a little garden, having a lot of children, and eating lots of peaches…”
One of the constant themes I encounter in coaching pastors and denominational leaders is the lack of white space in very full lives.
Many of us are drowning in the over stimulation of color filling every square inch of the page of our lives.
The color itself is not bad, in fact it is beautiful. But it is overpowering without the white space.
As you read this article notice the margins on the sides of the page which allow your eye to focus on the content. Without that margin each page would be an indistinguishable sea of words.
Where is the margin in your living – the space where God’s spirit is giving a border and background to all you’re doing?
I invite you to view today and tomorrow as an artist’s page and to paint each full and colorful stroke of the day with the rigorous discipline of a watercolor artist preserving the white space at all costs.
The Rev. Christopher Holmes is superintendent of the Annapolis District.
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