Photoshop is my friend. A few times a year I am required to send a group photo to be published either online or in print. I manage a large group of students, typically around 70, and whenever they succeed at whatever event they compete, a trophy comes home with us, and we take a large group photo. I am always the one who is taking the photo, and it truly is an ordeal to take such a “simple” photo! First there is the arrangement. Because I am dealing with 11 to 18-year-olds, they clump up with their friends, completely covering up anyone behind them, or completely hiding themselves behind someone else. I must break apart these groups and direct them into rows: shortest in the front and tallest in the back. Then when I look at my cell phone, the wriggling mass of humanity is far too wide for the camera, so we start asking kids to move in on the sides, which hides people again. After several minutes of accordion-ing the group then rearranging multiple times, I can finally see everyone, and take the picture! Except one kid who runs out from the middle with their cell phone saying, “My mom wants one, too!” After a few more minutes of reworking, I am able to see everyone and finally take a picture. I tell them all to smile while rapidly taking several pictures so that I end up with as many as I can manage before this pulsing bomb of children goes off and moves in all directions again. I finally retrieve the trophy, which was being held by a good student in the front, and hope it’s still in one piece. Why take so many pictures? Because there is always one who is making a face, forgot to smile, wriggled behind another at some point, or some other nonsense which would make their parent upset with me if I published THAT picture of their child. If I have another picture in all those I took that is good for that student, then my dear friend Photoshop helps.
There is never a perfect picture. That’s life! Especially with teens, and in today’s social media world, we believe that there are people with perfect lives, perfect lifestyles, and are happy and healthy all the time. We look into the mirror and see all the flaws and start to think that those exist only in ourselves.
The apostle Paul wrote, “… all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus …” (Romans 3:23-24).
All of us have flaws. We all have sinned. John said, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). That goes for all around us too. There is not perfect person on this earth today. If we try to pass ourselves off as sinless, we are no better than the Pharisees who Jesus describes as “whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So, [they] also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within [they] are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23:27-28).
The church is a brotherhood. We trust one another. We should have no reason to fear unrighteous judgment when we are troubled. Instead, we talk to each other and spend time with each other as brothers in Christ. Not to show off the new thing we have, or to only show the best sides of us, but to experience that brotherly love that’s familiar, knowing each other’s flaws so that we can “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2), and to “rejoice with those who rejoice, [and] weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).
The church is not clean and perfect; instead it is filled with people who have flaws, and who sin. God gives us the church so that we are not on our own, simply staring at the flaws in the mirror, and thinking that we have no true opportunity for salvation. The church loves each other and helps when things go wrong because perfect people do not need God. Thankfully, we have Jesus who said, “For the son of man came to seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10).
Like my picture, it is flawed. No matter how hard I try, or how much effort I put in, the pictures are never exactly how I want them to be. My life is the same way, and I know that yours is too. Let us acknowledge we are lost together and turn to Jesus as our salvation and the only way.
Lance Byers