at the centre

Week 6 Leviticus 14-Numbers 2

Directed doodling can help – it helped with Numbers 2 and 3.
They describe where each tribe was physically located in camp.
I got a sheet of lined paper, and found a black marker.
On the right side I wrote East. Beside, a bit to the left I added Issachar, Judah, and Zebulun – one under the other.
I added three more tribes beside South, West, North.
There was a perimeter of names on the edges of the sheet.
Near the empty middle I added a quadrangle of priests’ names. The Levi family: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari (plus Moses & Aaron on the East).
Inside the perimeter of priests – the very centre of the page – I wrote Tabernacle. I highlighted it with a blue marker.
The Tabernacle – the sanctuary. Inside the sanctuary, curtained off, was the sacro-sanctuary where the Lord would be present. Right in the centre of the camp.
So there it is: the Lord at the very centre, in the sanctuary, surrounded by the families of priests, surrounded by the twelve tribes.
Everything else, everything off my lined sheet, is Outside the Camp.
I end up with 22 hand-written words sitting in a rough geometry on the page. A stripped-down, keyword picture of the 85 verses in Numbers 2 and 3. Doing my own sweated-out version helped me focus.

Note: Numbers 3 doesn’t give details about the Tabernacle – I already read those in Exodus on a minus-29 degree January day.