 Meditations on Proverbs Proverbs 14:31
He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.
The physical shell I devote so much energy to is not the whole person. People are not mere collections of tendons, muscles, hair follicles, nerve cells, and skin cells. Each of them, regardless of deformed appearance and physical damage or absolute beauty and physical powerfulness, contains an immortal spirit and is a vessel of the image of God. Their physical cells will one day rejoin the basic elements of earth, the "humus" that constitutes the material part of humanity. But their souls live on, and my effect on those souls may have far more significance than my attempts to improve their physical bodies.
Although I may live in a society that honors strength, wealth, and beauty, God has also placed me among people who are often weak, poor, and unattractive. Each of us has the potential to help summon up in the people we meet the image of God, the spark of Godlikeness in the human spirit. Or, instead, we can ignore or squelch that image and judge only on the basis of external appearance. I pray that when I see a person I will see the image of God inside, and ultimate worth, not just the cultural "image" that we all strive to attain.
Mother Teresa said that when she looked into the face of a dying beggar in Calcutta, that she prayed to see the face of Jesus so that she might serve the beggar as she would have served Christ. In an often quoted passage, C.S. Lewis expressed a related thought: "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you not meet, if at all, only in a nightmare All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one of these destinations."
-excerpt is taken from In His Image by Philip Yancey, pg 32-33 ©2005 CopperCountry.com,Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. |