Darby Strickland
TSwift Mirror Ball song reference “I can change everything about me to fit in.” “How can I keep you looking at me?” A mirror ball only reflects the light that falls on it. What light are we turning towards?
The gaze we seek to attract is the voice we will obey.
God made us to gaze at Him and listen to Him. The Word turns our face toward our Creator and teaches us to see Him and listen to His voice. And as we gaze on Him we will reflect His glory and goodness.
Adam opens his eyes to a world he did not make and everything around him is given to him. All that he has is a gift, including God’s very presence. He did not make anything of what he experiences. Adam and Eve did not have to invent themselves and they don’t have to manufacture glory. Their personhood and identity are gifts! Their glory is a received glory, not made by them.
Everywhere we look in creation we see the gifts that God has given us. Our first posture was not self-invention but receiving.
The next voice that comes into the garden attacks God’s character and goodness. It asks us to question whether what God has given us is enough.
The serpent takes abundance and redefines it as deprivation. The serpent turns our attention away from all the good gifts of God, the fullness of the garden and all that is in it, to focus our attention on the one thing we were forbidden to receive.
Receiving becomes grasping. And desiring that which is not for us focuses our hearts and minds on shame, grief, and loneliness.
And so we exchange goodness and truth for lies and counterfeits (Romans 1). Listening to the voice of the serpent teaches us to look at the good gifts God has given us and say “not enough.”
We grasp at self-invention and making our own identities. We are compelled to decide who we are, work to become that person, and image ourselves to others. We look for created things to tell us who we are, including other people. We exchange the received identity we have from God for self-manufactured identities that require constant grasping. When gratitude dies, grasping begins. We seek lesser glories and gratification from created things.
When we ask good things to tell us who we are, we exchange the truth of who we are in God’s image for lies about who we are based in created things. When we ask a created thing to carry our identity it will rule us.
I am fully known by the God Who created me is replaced by a need for affirmation from other creatures.
Our bodies and not packaging for our selves. They are part of God’s good gift to us, not a hindrance to be overcome.
Receiving our bodies from God requires us to care for them without asking them to define who we are and our value.
When we seek relief from bodily struggles by allowing desires to rule our self-image, we turn from gratitude to grasping. Gratifying the desires of the flesh leaves us empty and grasping for that which can never satisfy us.
Life can be painful and feel unbearable when we can’t understand our unfulfilled desires. “This is what I experience(d)” becomes oppressive when we let it define who we are.
When we carry longings that are unfulfilled we need wise counsel and loving companions to remain faithfully obedient to the God Who is near.
Gratitude grows when we take our longings about our bodies to God and let go of our desires that come from discontent.
In our callings, we can turn our longings into felt needs and allow those desires to control our self-valuation. The good fruit we desire controls our perception of our worth.
Our calling gives us work to do but it does not give us worth to prove. We cannot ask God’s gifts to give us identity and affirmation that can only be found in resting in Him. We begin to grasp for that which cannot be taken, only given.
We cannot grasp gratitude. There is no way back on our own. We can’t reverse the exchange from this side. We need One who never grasps to bring us to the place of gratitude where we can rest in the identity given us by our Creator.
Jesus entrusts himself to the Father through hunger, rejection, suffering, and even death. Jesus enters the consequences of our terrible exchange and reverses it for us. In exchanging life for death, he gives us new identities. We become IN HIM the persons we were created to be. He continually frees us to live in gratitude and let go of our sinful desires for self-expression and counterfeit measurement of our worth.
When people express grasping desires we can’t tell them to stop grasping. We can only offer them the truth of who they are as creatures who
A mirror ball has no light of its own and neither do we. This is not a flaw in our design, but a truth we can rest in. The Lord God is our light.
Who told you who you are? The deepest truth about me is not who I am but Whose I am.
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