Post 253

On this lovely Thanksgiving Day, I am taking a break from watching TV with the family. I get bored of TV pretty easily.


I wrote this in my journal after a chat with one of my best friends:

So easily are people hardened by life. They become who they must be.

In one of my favorite books, a wife goes to a hardened outlaw to ask for her husband's life. At first, the outlaw is surly and unmovable, but then the wife reminds him of their youth, when at her request and because he loved her then, in all kindness and gentleness, he bandages and saves a baby deer instead of killing it. She reminds him of what his true heart was and what it could be again.

In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Aslan is able to conquer the witch because he has a deeper knowledge of magic than she. The magic that he knows is that when one willingly gives their life for a traitor, death itself works backwards. We are all bearers of a different "deeper magic". We know that inside these bodies bound by sin, worn down by the workings of sin in this world, is a sold that was made to commune daily and intimately with God, one deeply loved as a child- if only they could accept the fact. Before our race chose ourselves to be God, we had been made in his image. To be sure, that image has been distorted, but if we could only remember who we are...deeper still than the sin nature that we must grapple with. If while I interacted with the homeless man on the corner, the neighbor who plays the Beetles too loudly every night, or my student who is too high to care, I remembered that on their soul is the very fingerprint of God, might I love them better?

In The Secret Garden, the main character, Mary finds a secret garden and decides to make it her own. She tells another character, "I've stolen a garden! Nobody wants it. Perhaps everything is dead already. I don't care! Nobody has any right to take it from me when I care about it and they don't." Mary stubbornly decides that even though it is possible that the forgotten garden is completely dead, that she will love it and care for it, working to make it come alive. With her whole heart she works for her garden. The beautiful thing about the story is that while Mary works to make the garden come alive, she herself is awakened. She is able to leave her ugly, orphan-like, lonely ways behind. What if we loved people fiercely as Mary loved her garden? I truly believe that as we worked, we would find that something in our own souls would come alive. That is part of God's image in us.

Whenever I'm in a run-down part of town and I see and house and yard, well taken care of, I think to myself, "that person is living incarnately." Wherever we are bringing life and light, whenever we bring order from chaos, color and creativity to the dark and mundane, we are living in God's image. We are remembering our true selves, as the wife in the beginning of this ramble was able to remind the outlaw of who he once was.

Let us live in remembrance of God's image in ourselves and in others.

(and for all the literary references, I apologize. I believe with all my heart that literature shows God's heart in ways that allow us to see so clearly. and also, I hope that these ramblings make a lick of sense. )



currently listening to: Chase Coy, To Make This Alright
currently reading: Today I finished Sense and Sensibility and re-began reading Three Cups of Tea