Created in His Image

I listened to an interesting sermon this morning. One of the first points that was made was that God created man in His image. For some reason we felt the need to return the favor. It's really true.

We seem to expect God to fit into our perfect image if Him. When something happens to surprise us, we don't immediately accept it. No one expected a Saviour to born in a stable, or to willingly die on a cross. More than just seeing God in a specific way, we have also created images of God in way that resembles us. Or should I say the Caucasian us. Most paintings are not representing a man from the Middle East who spent most of his life walking around in the sand. We expect him to look like someone who lived in a century that wasn't his, but ours. We want him to look like us, because then we can relate to him. But that's not who he is. And maybe that's not who we are.

We expected Him to come 2000 years ago as a king, someone who would come with riches and power, but He didn't. Now we want Him to be meek and mild, and not interfere too much in our lives. But that's not the point. We don't always get what we want, and we don't have the right to manipulate what we have to make it what we want. He came in the only way He could to make the kind of difference that He could. We don't get to change that. We also don't get to choose how He will come again. That's up to Him.

Instead of always trying to make something fit into the image that we want, maybe we should take some time and accept people and things without the image we want to see on them. This can be really hard to do. When you stop seeing parents as exclusively parents and start seeing them as people. When you see your friends in only a supportive way, and not as people who also have needs. When you can see all those around you as people who need love and not simply people who walk past you. When you stop seeing yourself as someone who knows exactly what is going on, and have the ability to see yourself as someone who needs the same amount of love and acceptance as those around you. It's hard to stop putting people into the images that we want them to be in. It's hard because then we have to see them and not just look. It is worth it though. There are so many more people than the images that we shoehorn them into. And that's pretty cool to be able to see.