Diamonds

(excerpted/edited 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

Photo: Iona Drutu. Used by permission.

What does a human made in the image of God look like?  What was his original plan?  Well, for starters, since Jesus says he’s light (1 John 1:5), perhaps we each look like a light as well.  Or maybe, a diamond. 

A diamond is made of carbon, the same stuff that is 18% of you…and far and away the dominant solid element in you.  (Almost all the rest is oxygen and hydrogen – gases.  I’ll resist the hot-air conversation for now...)

A diamond has no light of its own, but if you shine a laser into a diamond (red is fine, but green is eye-popping), the room fills with brilliant points of light, like stars in red or green.  The pattern alters with every tiny change in the angle between the laser and the diamond.  The more the diamond is up on display, uncovered by its setting, the better the effect.  Diamonds deeply buried in mere metals don’t shine so well.

The light shines on the diamond’s surfaces and is reflected at different angles, but it also shines into the diamond’s heart and is refracted (bent) into many new directions inside the diamond.  Each new ray of light reflects internally and eventually emerges to become another point in our laser constellation, producing a pattern unique to that diamond that changes when the diamond moves.

If there were white-light lasers, those refracted-prism rays of light would be in all the colors of the rainbow.  All around, all colors, all glorious.

Maybe that’s like what scripture means when it says we will shine like stars or lights in the world (Daniel 12:3, Philippians 2:15).  We have no light except the one that God shines on us, but we reflect and refract that light in a thousand unique directions and colors.  And when we become Christians, it shines on us, through us, and for us, for always.

We have occlusions and stains and crooked angles in us.  Some were put there by others.  Some we put there, and keep there, ourselves.  But unlike the diamond, we have a diamond-Maker who’s at work even still.  He takes away some of the flaws.  Others he uses to enhance the beauty.  But in all, he is working to complete his design.  And he’s never too busy to stop and admire his work.  (Actually, he’s never too busy, at all.)

Scripture talks about this God who places every star in the sky and knows each by name (Psalms 147:4).  The same God shines his light on and through us; he designed and named all of our ways just as he named each star.  Like all of creation, we were made to be beautiful and wonderful.  He intended his people to be even more awe-inspiring than desert skies, unrecognizably crowded with lights.

We’re 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 from the very beginning, who said it was all good.