Created In God’s Image

By Alli Sullivan

My hair gets rather poofy these days and I thought it might be time to trim it up. Easier said than done when you’re in a foreign country with no transportation. So I figured I would just do it myself. I scrounged through the kitchen drawers and found a pair of children’s safety scissors. Perfect!

I wet my hair, brushed it out, sectioned it off and started trying to pull the hair straight out between my two fingers like the hair dresser always does so easily. But… oh boy! It was so much more difficult than I thought! It was nearly impossible to pull the chunks from the back forward to see what was going on. And the mirrored reflection I was working with kept messing with my depth perception. Mirrors are meant to be such a perfect reflection but their view is so limited! Eventually I just blindly pulled chunks in the back and based my cutting on what I could feel.

It actually turned out pretty decent from what I can tell, but the whole process made me think a little bit about reflections. The reflection I was getting from the mirror while trying to cut my hair was so frustrating! I couldn’t figure out how to get a view of the whole picture. I never was able to see the back of my head and everything looked backwards. It would have been much easier if I had a mannequin or some sort of representation of myself to look at. Is a reflection all that it’s cracked up to be?

reflection |riˈflek sh ən|
noun
the throwing back by a body or surface of light, heat, or sound without absorbing it

I’m not sure if I want to be a reflection…I want to absorb God. I want to be saturated with God’s character so that it is no longer me but only God. That not only am I doing what He is doing but that He is the one doing it–I’m just the empty glove with His hand inside. We were created in His image not so that we could give a limited, inverse view of Him, but we were created to represent His heart on this earth. We were made in His likeness (Gen. 1:26), and that is all it’s cracked up to be!

likeness |ˈlīknis|
noun
the fact or quality of being alike; resemblance; outward appearance of; representation

That’s what I want! I want to have the appearance of Him, I want to be His representation. Not just a surface reflection but to act in his behalf as a representative! And that’s how we were created. We are more than a reflection!

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me…” (Gal 2:20).

It’s not us reflecting God – it’s God existing through us. We are His image!

So when I’m trying to comprehend this and thinking about how to reflect God I get so frustrated because I can’t “reflect” the whole 360 degree image of Him. On my own strength I’m just a small wall mirror at best. The great news is that it’s no longer I who live! That verse in Galatians continues to say that “…the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The life that I now live is focused only on my faith in the One who promised me a life in His image.

If you would like a reminder of what God’s “mirror” shows us about ourselves, click to download our free Who I Am In Christ resource.

Every Wednesday we’ll be considering a practice related to our body, soul or spirit to help us completely devote ourselves to Jesus.