In His Image

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;"

~ Genesis 1:26a

It seems as though recently I have been given some unique opportunities to look into the faces of women I do not know. The journalist asking me questions about my motives for pulling weeds all afternoon. The vendor discussing calories and soaps and barbeque. (Yes, this is usually what happens when I go out for the day.) Or the artist sharing with me her dream to gain exposure and move her inventory. I look into the faces of those with whom I regularly meet and think to myself, "These are my sisters." But the ones I meet in some sort of passing transaction or abbreviated moment of commonality? It is their eyes that draw me to wonder. It is their smile in which I give thanks. It is the symmetry and solidarity of their features that causes me to contemplate the perfect glory of God.

When I began working, I had one goal in mind for my growing finances: contact lenses. My vision was (and is) so bad, the lenses of my glasses were ridiculously thick and caused my eyes to appear as little more than dots surrounded by large plastic frames. My mother --always one to keep it 100 when it came to my dreams --reasoned, at least glasses hid my large nose. So much for symmetry and solidarity of features when looking in the mirror. But God is an artist. And while I've never come to love my large nose, I've come to share it with a couple of children and realize it's not the worst thing about me. Far more important that I bear the image of my God in my words and my attitude than fixate on the condition of tangibles I cannot change. Far more important that I see the beauty in others, that I see the image of God in them, than worry over my perceived physical imperfections.  

In his essay, Presence: The Gaze of Beauty, Curt Thompson (Ordinary Saints, 2023, p.217) talks about the Artist who brought more than order to chaos in the creation of this world, but beauty. When God declared all He created as "good," He declared it beautiful as well. Thompson adds:

God is not only calling something beautiful that He sees to be so, true as that is. ...the beauty that God sees emerges as a function of God looking at it. Beauty appears as a direct result of being seen by God. His gaze, His presence--draws beauty forth, for His nature can do nothing less. 

What a privilege it is for mankind to not only bear the image of the Everlasting God, but to look for it in others; to create beauty in this world by searching for it in places of chaos or imperfection or familiarity or difference. Imagine finding beauty --creating beauty by discovering it in a whirlwind of dead leaves and dust or staring into a bathroom mirror at a large nose. Or creating beauty in the dozens of questions launched at you each day before you've had your coffee, or in the face of your enemy.

This world could use less ugly and more beauty. Differences should not divide us into feuding, abhorring camps. We are all of one race, the human kind. We have all been planned and fashioned by one God, the God of Scripture. We are His masterpiece, created for His glory. Oh, what beauty there is in regarding those who refuse to acknowledge Him as casualties in Satan's useless war against the True King, rather than enemies. Oh, what beauty there is in praying for them, speaking life into their situations, rather than dismissing them as chaotic, less than, common, or "the other side." God created this world and all those in it for a purpose. Let us spend greater time noticing His image in the faces of others and in so doing, join our Creator in producing beauty where ugly threatens to destroy.