Back when my wife, Diana, and I were engaged, I found a picture of Her and a prom date. Diana looked beautiful. She had perfectly coiffed big ’80s hair. She was smiling. Her date was wearing a rented pastel tux and he looked a little nervous. His name was James. The only thing that I really knew about him was that he had really good taste in girls. I was a little bothered…okay…jealous, so I thought I would try to change the romantic picture…literally. This was before photoshop, so I grabbed some scissors and scotch tape. I cut out a picture of my smiling face and taped it on top of his. Suddenly, I was the guy in the picture! But, it just didn’t look right. For one thing, it wasn’t proportionate. My face was too big and he wasn’t built like me. I showed it to Diana. I was sure that she would be impressed by my act of creative love, and I could tell that she was by the way she rolled her eyes. To be fair, the redone photo was an unsettling image. My freakishly large head looked unnatural. That’s what happens when you try to rewrite history, you end up with a freakish misrepresentation. The thing was that you could peel my picture off and James was still there. Despite my efforts, He was still a part of the story. Rather than try to rewrite a part of Diana’s story, I should have rejoiced that I was the man who got to stand by her for the rest of the story.
We live in a photoshop world. If we don’t like something, we simply crop it out of the picture.
We are constantly trying to crop all the unpleasantness out of our stories.
We try to airbrush away all our blemishes.
We want to protect our image. We don’t want to offend.
But, it doesn’t seem like God is concerned with protecting His image.
The Bible is most uncropped book ever, it is brutally honest.
There are stories of liars, murderers, prostitutes, adulterers and screw ups. And those are the GOOD guys! It’s there, in all its ungutted and unfiltered glory.
The Bible isn’t really family friendly and the disturbing thing is that God didn’t try to fix that!
It’s pages are filled with more rule breakers than record breakers. Despite what we were told in Sunday school, the biblical patriarchs weren’t shiny, perfect, airbrushed flannel gram role models.
The Bible is the story of some broken people who didn’t stay broken…they are models of redemption.
Can you picture a nervous editor looking over the original transcript and saying to God: “let’s rethink this section, it might offend people…I’m not sure if the bible will go over well in the Bible Belt!”
“Let’s edit…let’s crop out the ugly.”
But, God doesn’t seem to be concerned with public relations, He is more interested in authentic relationship.
The Bible is raw and honest….
Combine the real with the redemptive and hope is born.
God doesn’t Photoshop, instead He gives us a brand new photo op.
We don’t get a rewrite of the past, BUT, We do get a brand new chapter today.
It seems like the bible is all about honest hope.
God says be honest about your yesterday and see what I can do with your tomorrow.
You can’t crop what has already happened, but you can create what is yet to be.
Live honest with hope.
carbonated joy 