Shadows and Light

Being a Christian doesn't mean being better than anyone else, it means being fully aware of how bad you are.

This weekend I met a man who said "I"m a worse sinner now than I was when I met Christ thirty years ago"

When he went on to explain himself he said that he didn't actually fashion himself to be a worse sinner, but rather, he knew his sin so much more. He might have been a slightly "better" sinner since thirty years ago, but fixing one problem only to discover that you've always had 1,000 other ones isn't really a recipe for success.

Jesus is the light, so we've heard. But you know the closer you get to the source of light the greater a shadow you cast. You still stay the same size you've always been but the perceived darkness grows as you approach that which banishes darkness. Weird thought isn't it?

We are trying to become like Jesus. And it's actually pretty easy when we don't really know what Jesus looks like. When he's an indistinct figure in the distance, or we can only see him through the smudged and dirty lens of our fallen perception it's pretty easy to imagine that when we get a better view we will discover that we do, in fact, look a whole lot like him.

But it never works out that way. The closer we get, the clearer the window becomes, the more we see that we are, in fact, not at all like him. Shedding more light on the issue just reveals that which we would rather leave in darkness.

Growing is never really what we expect is it?