Quotations to Think About #3
“If you want to look at creation full, creation at its highest, you look at a person- a man, a woman, a child. The faddish preference for appreciating creation in a bouquet of flowers over a squabbling baby, for a day on the beach rather than rubbing shoulders with uncongenial neighbors in a cold church – creation with the inconvenience of persons excised – is understandable, but it is also decidedly not creation in the terms it has been revealed to us.” – Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Eerdmans, 2005): 53.
These words close the circle of community around us. If we want to be in fellowship with God, we have to recognize His glory in the faces of those near us. People are God’s crowning achievement, and they radiate the profound truth of God. Yet at the same time, people grumble, moan, and reflect everything that God is not with their selfishness and insecurity.
The mature Christian can squarely look into the eyes of a complainer and see the glory of God—however glazed over it might be. We then act as salt for the world drawing our strength not from ourselves but from our deep communion with the True and Living Light.
“So may you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life” Philippians 2:15-16.
