Christian Living

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We are created in God's image: how wonderful! Created with human capabilities that reflect the divine. We can love and appreciate, we can laugh and cry--we can live life with divine exuberance. And we can create--because we're like God. And we can make things work because we're like God. But we can do all those things successfully only within the parameters of our humanity. And because of our ambition and our enthusiasm and our very God-likeness, the line between our work and God's work sometimes blurs, insidiously and unnoticed. Perhaps well-intentioned people of good will fall into this trap more often that those who don't care one way or the other. In trying to make things work out well, they unknowingly or unconsciously slide over into God's realm. And there they suffer endless frustration--divinely assigned--because they are out of their appointed sphere.

The Tower of Babel comes to mind as a good example of this. I don't think those were terribly wicked people. They just let their God-likeness get out of hand. They were builders, bright and intelligent, but their ambition ran away with them. They crossed over the line into what belongs to God. But God didn't kill them; He just blocked their foolishness by scrambling their language, thus reminding them who He was and who they were. He put them back where they belonged for their own good.

Because we wear the divine image, we are responsible at the human level to use these characteristics to make things work out well insofar as we are able; to reflect the goodness of our Maker, to be creative and ingenious in problem-solving BUT to remember that there is a distinct line between our work and God's work. Recognizing that at a certain point we can do no more, that from there on it's up to God, is to have learned Babel's lesson.

We are God-like, but we are not God. For our own emotional and spiritual well-being, we need to recognize the line of separation and be willing to turn loose when we have done all we can: to let go and let God.

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