Is the image we seek ours or God’s?
Every year when we do family photos, I struggle with the internal desire to get just one good photo of everyone smiling perfectly at the camera.
Even though every year I also end up saying that in retrospect I like the photos better when the boys are just being themselves.
It is true that the best photos are always the ones where I am able to see exactly who they are in that moment – in all their goofiness and messiness and childlike ways.
Photos aren’t meant to be perfect because we are not perfect. But man do I often need that reminder.
Right now with all that is going on around us, we risk getting caught up in our vision instead of God’s vision. In that desire to have the world and the people in it fit our image, we can inadvertently assume we know exactly what God wants for each person. Would that we could know the mind of God!
I’m discovering as I raise my boys that they are all incredibly different. It is these differences that both infuriate me sometimes and other times show me how magnificent God really is – that God can make billions of people, each one special and unique and chosen. That God can make us all perfectly imperfect and love us for the whole of who we are.
This morning, my prayer is a quote from Thomas Merton. I pray that I may read and absorb these words and use them to help me in every interaction I have this week. I pray you absorb them too as we continue to understand what it means to truly love one another:
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Let us love each other as God loves us – no requirements, no pretense, no expectation.
*This image was the result of me asking for just one cute photo of them all on the bench.
