04/22/15
I’ve been having opportunities to watch the “difficult” play out in people’s lives. My investment is shallow. I don’t know them very well. Their versions are one-sided. My versions of my story are one-sided, too. Heck, if even our language couple can’t decide on the best way to say, “I’m thirsty,” how can any of us hope to reconcile the two sides of a multi-faceted life-storyline? Today I got to talk with Heather about painting. The old stuff. Art college days. As I chatted with her about it, I remembered inwardly the battles that would go on during in-class critiques of each others’ works. How students who didn’t paint portraits would get so upset about another student that would depict a person a certain way, sometimes in seemingly cliché ways.
Remember those amazing sheet/dream paintings? Life-sized portraits of sleeping people with their actual bedsheets as the canvas. Man, how I loved those! They were so intimate. A moment in time, captured by the artist, depicting the deep sleep of people and their inward thoughts/dreams, as he imagined them.
What made these paintings seem cliché at the moment was the fact that there was a painting of an Indian woman which showed primitive drawings floating through her dreams. Despite the negative comments, I immediately connected in my mind: “This guy must have a deep and meaningful relationship with this woman. She allowed him to observe her at the peak of vulnerability. He’s not just any artist, he is a trusted friend.” As a friend observing an intimate and personal moment, he painted what was most important to her. To others, he was a stranger gawking on a brown, sleeping woman and he simplified and objectified her by painting her juxtaposed with stereotypical images of things that went with her brown skin. It was shocking to me, the lack of insight and hairline depth of their interpretation. He had painted her sleeping among those images, because he knew those images mattered to her. His intimate knowledge of her made those images meaningful, even if those dissecting his painting didn’t have a clue.
So, here I sit, 3 cups of coffee into thoughts about my own limited observations of real peoples’ lives. I don’t really know them. God knows, I’ll never deeply understand them. As simply a person created in God’s image, it’s literally impossible to delve into the hearts and minds of people created in God’s image. We are a reflection, folks. Apart from reflections, we don’t even see our own faces, let alone the struggles, joys, and beliefs of the inner person.
People love those Dove commercials that make the case for treating ourselves as valuable and seeing ourselves as beautiful. It’s all the rage to try and lift each other out of the mire of Facebook/Twitter comments and blog post commenters who seek to destroy anyone that doesn’t live up to the haughty standards they feel everyone should be living up to (even if they themselves don’t abide by their own standards). But why? A secular society, who continually distance themselves from God, seek to find internal and external value beyond their outward appearance and cheer for those trying to do the same. But, aside from voiced and typed thoughts, all we know of each other is an outward appearance. A mixture of signals received by the eye and interpreted by the brain. What are people or their opinions worth?
Immediately, my mind races to the subject of “population control” and all the turning of humanity’s focus to the number of people in the world versus the number of resources available for sustaining said population. Those who feel we are being “irresponsible” by allowing more and more people to overtake the earth write their opinions juxtaposed with images of human sprawl. Shanties, poverty, pollution, etc. It’s like taking a mass of unknown, unknowable, and unimportant humans and drawing math equations to show they have no value. Area + people + pollution = “Not cool.” (According to Ashton Kutcher.) Take out “area” and “pollution” and what you end up with is people = not cool. What are we doing?? If my heart can be overwhelmed by the depth of a single person, who am I to say people I’ve not even met have no value? Or their future offspring? I can’t just post pictures of empty and vast fields and valleys and drum up this conclusion: “world half empty, divide and conquer.” Either conclusion turns people and the earth into shallow game pieces that can be rearranged to satisfy personal opinions.
Ultimately, our opinion about it doesn’t amount to anything. My opinions about heartache heard though ears coming from one-sided mouths, doesn’t amount to much. Class critiques on a guy’s paintings usually don’t illicit the value of the experiences he’s had in the relationships with his willing subjects. It’s personal and it’s largely invisible. To quote a Sara Groves song, “Who can know the pain, the joy, the regret, the satisfaction? Who can know the love of one life, one heart, one soul, until you’re at abstraction?” (Abstraction) Why does it matter if I think I’m beautiful and why does Dove care? Why does it matter that mean people say nasty things to a woman who blogs about fitness? Why get offended if a man paints a brown woman next to cave paintings? Why tell a mom of six boys that she’s being irresponsible for having a seventh child that happens to be a girl? Why look at population sprawl and think it’s a shame there are so many people living? Why do I care about a person’s disadvantages in life and the good or bad decisions they have made on top of it all? Why care when a virtual stranger’s marriage is falling apart? Why not care? Why care?
Where is the baseline? Does it exist? It does. The baseline, the starting point, it’s the Person responsible for my beauty, my friend’s sorrow, that guy’s artistic talent, those peoples’ poor interpretation skills, that mom’s love of her children, all those people living in jaw-dropping sprawl, and the demise of a person’s marriage. He doesn’t just know about these things. These things didn’t just happen to people. He made this world and everything in it, He even planned it all out before He laid the foundations of this earth and before He filled it with amazing resources. He made the earth, filled it, and then made us. People. He made us in His image. THAT gives us value. Jesus gave us value, His value. When the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit planned all things, He planned us and made us image-bearers. He loved us. I won’t get into sin right now, nor the consequences of it, but I do know that all of it, ALL OF IT, was planned and has been implemented with precision. He knew we would push Him away. He knew that when we did, we would forget that we are made in His image. We would prioritize ourselves over others like ourselves. He knew we would live selfishly and shallowly, serving and worshiping ourselves at the detriment to everything around us: our resources, our planet, each other, and our unborn. That we would devise ways to make our lives convenient, even if it meant hiding our trash. That we would even kill our own children to put off personal responsibility. To the point of crunching numbers to figure out a way to keep humanity small and our resources big (as if those two things are exclusive of each other). In prioritizing creation above Creator, resources over image-bearers… what do we accomplish?
We accomplish NOTHING. We submit and surrender ourselves to our half-baked plans for saving ourselves and creation and end up with nothing. Empty hands, broken hearts, a groaning earth, and a lot of dead people. In seeking self deliverance, we acquire eternal damnation.
Does Jesus have a plan for all those people in those sprawling photos? Does He have a plan for my friend who has suffered so much? Yes. Will He deliver them all, rescuing them in His eternal salvation through the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ? No. He won’t. Do I understand that? No, I don’t. Do I have to understand it in order for His purposes and ethics to be good? No. My perception and comprehension of His plan doesn’t make His plan good. My thoughts on my own appearance doesn’t make me more or less beautiful, sorry Dove. My interpretation of a friend’s choices, even if I can offer good advice based on those interpretations, won’t actually speak to the depths of it that I will never know, because I’m not her. Ashton Kutcher’s opinion about the need for population control can not take away the value of those people because God made them valuable even if Ashton disagrees. God’s plan is good, and there is nothing you and I can do about it. It’s impossible for us to grasp it, but all those things that I mentioned above, they matter because people matter, and people matter because people matter to God.
It all comes back to Him. It comes to this: Are you His? Have you surrendered to Him? Are you His child, or are you His enemy? We are all made in His image, but we all need to be born again into His salvation. We are loved as we are, still in our sin, but we are not good enough to stay that way. We have to be born once, into death, and born again into life. Everlasting life. In salvation, the circumstances of our friends lives may not change. With Jesus, the lifestyle of poverty lived by those people in those photos may not change. This is a harsh reality here on earth. But, what does change is their eternity. With God, nothing is impossible. What effect does hope have on a mass of hopeless people? Even population-poster-boy would agree that hope changes a lot of things. My prayer is for every person on this planet to hear about the greatest Hope that ever walked the earth, Jesus Christ. That their ears and eyes would be opened to the only Truth that can save us all.
Slow to Speak 