Out of whose picture?
Topic: God things


There is a commercial on tv right now that flips my lid every time I see it. Commercials have become somewhat of an art form in themselves the past few years…I wish there was some was to capture and archive them. I’m sure a VCR would work, but how to know when the commercial will air and on what channel…now that is a dilemma. The ad I am talking about is for HP digital photography. It has a catchy tune by The Robins called Out of the Picture and the guy in the ad is sitting in a chair, holding up pictures beside his head of….his head! It is so ingenious….each time he holds up a new picture, his head beside the picture becomes part of the new picture. At the end, he holds up a full sized picture of his head and it becomes just a frame he is looking through and he puts his head through the frame, the object being the realistic quality of photos you can get from the new HP printer. Are you getting all of this? If not, and you haven’t seen the commercial, I found where you could watch it on the internet.
Go to the TV ad entitled Francois 2. You won’t regret it. =)

Photography is a hobby of mine…I wish I had more time to play with it. I plan to get back into this year….with my new digital camera and all my free time. =) (Now if I just had one of those fancy printers!) I love how you can take an ordinary picture, add special effects, make it artsy and give it your own signature style…..take an image from reality and tweak it to become a creation of our own.

Art is something we create, using our God given talents. I once read a quote from the late musician, Rich Mullins, that was a response to someone asking him if he thought that God wrote the songs through him, since there was so much originality and theology in his writing. He responded, of course not! He said God gave us creativity and he thought God enjoyed seeing what we created and used for Him….what we would say about Him, write, sing, paint, and draw. I agree. God created art for us in nature, in animals, plant life, in all the kinds of people He created. And I think He enjoys seeing us create things, express our thoughts, express our love and praise to Him. It’s our part of the sacred romance.

We can create and add our own signature style to things of earth, but it’s a huge mistake we people tend to make to add our own ‘style’ to our image of God. He’s given us the Bible and shown Himself to us through it and through nature. We need to accept who He is and that He is above ‘figuring out’ or making Him into an image of human proportions. He is so much more….so infinite, so holy. He came down to our level to die for us and give us such an easy way to bridge that expansive gap between Creator and creation, caused by sin. I don’t think He would have gone through all of that, becoming the sacrifice for our sin, if it didn’t matter what we believed….if sin wasn’t a big deal. It is a huge deal! And He is so patient with us while we figure that out. (…as we should be with others, by the way, with that big old pole sticking out of our eyes.)

Jesus showed us such a loving, approachable view of God, that sometimes I think we have lost the sense of His holiness and unchanging quality. I see it everyday…on the news, tv shows, in my own church, even in my own mind and life. We justify things that the Bible says are unacceptable. We cannot reinvent our God to suit our own style or beliefs….I think it is awesomely graceful of Him not to just smite us here and now when we do that. **lol** What the Bible teaches us about Him is so far above where we put Him sometimes. So these are the thoughts that came out of my heart today, after seeing that commercial and thinking about art, creative styling and trying to think of what God is telling me through it.

I saw a poster once, I bought it and put it in my room as a teenager. It said, “Eternity will be at once a great eye opener…..and a great mouth shutter!”

Don’t you love it? God is….God. Nothing we say or do changes who He has been since the Beginning. If we all got more into reading His Word (that He gave to us, protecting and preserving it over the years) rather than in listening to who others think He is, we would live differently I think. Maybe we would start seeing things the way He does. I think we would even start to sin less and see others as He does and love them more.

Start today…here is the tool I use online to do word searches on different topics in the Bible.