Whose image do we reflect?
the Created versus the curated
I’ve been thinking a lot through this question lately.
The reasons are many, but a few specifics are related to some of our teaching focus with our students, and some of it has been simply conversations at home as we try to talk to our girls about the world we live in and some of the brokenness that is rearing its ugly head right now.
How do you talk about the value of humans you’ve never met? How do you talk about the disparity between how people are treated? How do you talk about self-worth and self-talk that can often be negative or destructive? How do we train our kids in such a way as to see themselves through the right lens and perspective?
It all comes back to whose image we reflect.
We live in a world that seems to actually live more online at times than offline. We get our news online maybe more often than person-to-person. Or, the person we’re getting our news from got their news from an online source.
We share our own news and updates online first. We share and post and download and repost and all the things. Online.
While we live so much time online, we have an opportunity to carefully and intentionally curate our image to reflect how we want to be seen, understood, perceived.
This curation can be a helpful thing. It can help shave off some of our rough edges as we (hopefully) pause before posting and consider our words before hitting send. Though too often we have anonymity behind a keyboard and through a screen that somehow intellectually wires us to feel the freedom to say something we likely wouldn’t say if we were eye to eye instead of thumb to thumb.
What’s the big deal between reflecting our curated image instead of God’s Created image?
Well, it does appear that instead of living as the imago Dei in God’s Created world and following His Created and Creative Design, we seem to live by a carefully curated and consistently updated image of who we expect others to see us as or at least who we project ourselves to be.
The issue is that often times the projection is just a distortion of the original.
It’s not the original design but an amplified, bigger, louder, more noticeable image. That image leads to pixelated features, unnatural colors, edits and a curated image that no longer visibly represents God’s created image of you.
We have remade, or re-created, ourselves in the image of our curation instead of our Creator.
And I just wonder if all this curation has actually brought us to a place where it is harder to recognize God’s Created. Do we de-value others because we have only seen their curated image through the lens of whomever we follow or listen to? Have we missed the Truth that they are actually Created by our Creator, the Sovereign God?
My prayer is that we may have our hearts transformed and our eyes rewired to see the imago Dei in our neighbor, our brothers and sisters, and treat them accordingly.