Coming soon - interview with a Between-the-Lines guy

Monday I get to interview Dale Hendry, who with his wife Vicki runs the local Center of Hope.  Center of Hope is a smaller-scale version of the Los Angeles Dream Center (which is an awesome story all its own; look it up).  This place takes folks who are homeless or just out of prison, who have drug/alcohol addictions, and walks them through a road to healing and restored life in Jesus.  Stay tuned!

How you're like a diamond

(pre-publication excerpt from Between the Lines:  Christianity for Misfit Christians)

 “children of God...seen as lights in the world, holding up the word of life.”

– Philippians 2:15b-16a

What does a human made in the image of God, the imago dei, look like?  Well, for starters, since Jesus says he’s light, perhaps we look like light as well.  Or maybe, a diamond.

Shine a light  into a diamond.  (Red is fine, but green is eye-popping.)  Then, we’re surrounded by brilliant points of light, like stars in red or green.  The pattern changes constantly, with every tiny change in the angles between the laser and the diamond.

The light shines on the diamond, and is reflected from the facets at different angles.  But the light also shines in to the diamond, and is refracted (bent) into many new directions inside the diamond.  Each new ray of light reflects internally and eventually emerges from one facet or another to add another point of light to the ceiling, like another star in a constellation. 

If there were such a thing as a white-light laser, those refracted rays of light would produce stars in all the colors of the rainbow.  All around, all colors, all glorious.

The diamond has no light of its own, at least at first.  But as its owner shines his light onto and into it, it produces a constellation of lights, unique to that diamond, and changing as the diamond moves and lives. Maybe that’s kind of like what the scripture means that says we will shine like stars or lights in the world.  We shine with no light except that which comes from God, but we can reflect and refract that light in a thousand different directions and colors.

Scripture paints a picture of a God who places every star in the sky, and knows each by name.  Such a God shines his light on and through us; he designed and named all of our ways just as he named each star.  Like stars in the night, we were made to be beautiful, and wonderful.  He intended the constellation of his people to be as awe-inspiring as the night sky over Sinai, crowded to unrecognizability with lights.

We are made of mere carbon, the stuff of pencils and coal mines and diamonds.  The difference between us and a lump of coal is the shaping hand of a Creator, a good God, who ordained beauty in all things at the Creation, who said it was all good.