Connect the dots

How to play connect the dots: Envision the final result. Place dots to loosely outline your vision. Connect one dot to the next. Assess the image. Round corners, add detail, make adjustments as needed.

As children, our parents envision images for us and place the dots, numbering them in succession. It is our job, to take pencil to page to connect 1 to 2 to 3... We hold the pencil! We practice counting! And we can! And it makes pictures!

In our youth, we can already see the image in the dotted outline. We want to envision our own images. And, maybe we don't want to number the dots, drawing straight lines in succession. Life is about so much more than 1, 2, 3. Maybe we think this entire game is useless and make a paper airplane instead. Throw it!

In later years, the concept of connecting the dots becomes useful to us again: to envision realities and create process to solve complex puzzles. Lacking inate artistic skill, we can utilize the gifts of planning and strategy to bring ideas into being.

Today, social media companies are creating art out of the connections of your life. By literally drawing out your connections, they are making a kind of living connect-the-dots... of you. Colourful thin lines and inky dots depict the connects from person to person. Like magic constellations. There is so much beauty, literally, in visualizing these connections.

Surprisingly, by visually mapping your social network, social media companies (such as Facebook) are able to track and predict your social path. By studying your connections and your dots, Facebook can predict your upcoming divorce, a new job, psychopathic tendencies or your teen experimenting with drug use. This practice of mapping connections and dots is giving social media companies, and the marketing companies who purchase this information from them, a god-like insight into you.

Having insight into humanity isn't harmful in and of itself. It is useful to us all to live lives in faith. However, the insights gained by social media companies are specifically and solely used to predict and therefore influence your future, your perceptions, your wallet, and your impact. In other words, through advertising, and giving you presents, games, distractions and so-called opportunities to connect, the corporate world of social media literally marks you with a dot, and creates a strategic sequence of numbered dots for you to follow. In essence they are forging your connections out of your vulnerabilities, weaknesses and needs for their own profit.

For example: if Facebook is able to predict that you will be divorced, the natural next step is to provide you with advertisements for, let's say, divorce lawyers or singles clubs. However, if a true friend learned of the tension between yourself and your spouse, that friend would probably direct you toward couple's therapy or techniques to communicate better, with the hopes of saving the relationship.

I finally understand what the church means by the saving power of Christ. Sometimes I find that concept very difficult to understand, and a bit disempowering. But I think I finally get it, and I'll try to share that with you here: what the ministers and the church are trying to tell us is that by placing dots and making connections with other caring people within a loving community (for example: by going to church, synagog or mosque), our vulnerabilities are more protected from others who would take advantage of them to fulfill their own agendas. When we reinforce our values regularily within a community of other loving people, our values become stronger and more resistant to negative forces of the outside world.

I sincerely hope that this translation will bring you insight into your life. Whether your faith or values are drawn with a Christian, Buddist, Muslim or Questioning "pencil" : understand that there is something of a divine strength in the lines we draw with our spiritual pencils, connecting our dots to other people's dots... making ourselves resilient in the face of negative outside forces, and making beautiful images of kindness and justice in our lives and the lives of other people.

xo Martha Merry

p.s. many thanks to my minister for mentioning "connecting the dots" in last week's sermon... inspiring :)

#church #socialjustice