One evening when our kids were over, we recognized that the grandkids were quietly playing in the
family room....now different families of grandkids coming together in a family
room and playing together and being noticeably and commendably quiet is not something that
you normally associate in that environment. But it was so! All of a
sudden the silence spoke to our parental nature and we headed to see what was
up in the game room.....It was a sort of weird phenomenon but we looked down
and the kids were all huddled around this toy gas station. The station had built into it a garage, and deep in the wall way
back was a piece of metal which was to be used as a mirror. When you put a car
in front of it, the reflection looked like a bunch of cars and this caught the
kids imagination...the image was very poor but nevertheless it made one car
look like several.....and several cars made it look totally undiscernible, but
it kept them concentrating on mixing combinations of cars and colors to see how
the reflection (though it was bad) would turn out....the metal was a very poor way to reflect the proper image of its
subject ......
When I was a
kid, we had a wonderful three bedroom camp in Tionesta, PA. When we bought the
camp, it had a lot of primitive old items in it, and two or three of them were
mirrors that hung in each room...the years had taken their toll on those
mirrors and the winters, where the camp sat unused for months without heat,
played an enormous rule in their effectiveness to reflect...so when you went to
look into one of them, all you could see was this black coming through. Whatever
image you hoped to see when you approached it, was always disrupted by that
black on the mirror. When I was little I would try unsuccessfully to wash it
off. Those mirrors could not reflect the clarity that the subject being
reproduced wished to see! You could look in those mirrors and never see the
lettuce on your tooth or the poppy seed stuck in a crevice near your gums.....lol.....
I was
thinking of the gospels this week and I just so deeply thought of the apostles,
those dear fisherman, those twelve men who were providentially called to be
Christ’s witnesses in the world after He Himself had left it. It was to be
their peculiar duty to give to the world a faithful account of their Master’s
words and deeds, and a just image of His character, a true reflection of His
spirit. This duty could only be given to us by persons who had been, as nearly
as possible, eye-witnesses and servants of the Master from the beginning. Those
twelve on whom so much depended, it plainly behooved to possess very
extraordinary qualifications....those
twelve mirrors would have to be finely polished because they were designed to
reflect the image of Jesus...
…us too!
