Carved to Look Like Jesus
The bedbugs are dead. As far as I know…
Now it is the rats. And the need to bring our 60+ year-old house up to code…
Now we are looking at more demolition, reconstruction, permits, bids, furring out, filling in, reconfiguring, rewiring, inspections, more waiting, waiting, waiting…
So many more things are up in the air now , but none of this surprises our all-knowing God. None of this distresses Him because it is His doing! (Don’t send me nasty letters about how God only does pleasant things…) It is not that He enjoys making our lives miserable, but that He is doing what is needed to shape us into the resemblance of Jesus. It is not that we will all be exact copies of Jesus like some kind of clones (No beard for me, please.), nor that each of us will display the complete glories of his whole fabulous person, but that we will reflect clearly and accurately the aspect or facet of Jesus that we have carried in rough form since the womb.
God created each of us to reflect His glory in some unique way. Since Scripture declares that we are chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, we can know that God’s creation of us is completely intentional. His purpose to conform us to the image of Jesus is behind how we are made, where we are placed, who wounds us, and how. All the things that come into our lives as His children have this intent: to shape us to reflect corporately the image of Jesus to a watching universe.
I think it’s like one of those photo-montages or mosaic of a famous face or work of art made of tiny photos of other people. When God is done with us, together we will look like Jesus! But in the meantime, He is carving us to fit exactly where He had in mind from before the beginning.
It will be glorious!
But in the meantime, it looks like chaos and feels like pain; it seems like disruption and feels like frustration. Holding on to the promise that all this will create in me the perfect image of Jesus’ left pinky toenail, or His right earlobe, that God meant for me to be all along…gives reason to keep going and not give up.
So I strap on the tool belt, pick up the broom, sort the papers and books, and ask for help to keep the big picture in mind as I am
Following Jesus every day in the everyday,
Christi
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