You Are Something More
Consider your crown. Seriously, consider you crown. that may sound strange right now. Allow me to explain.
We go about our daily lives – the rituals and routines. We go through the motions. We eat, sleep, work a lot and play a little. And do it all over again the next day.
It’s easy for life to become mundane. It’s easy to just let the days pass in the wind. Sometimes it’s easy to enjoy. Sometimes it’s easy to become frustrated, to let the little things get to us.
More and more people put off things like faith, hope, and love expressed through the body of Christ that we call the church. Oh, I’ll be part of that next week… Or the next… Or the next. And the spiritual life is pushed to the back burner.
I think we forget who we are, whose we are. I think maybe our day-to-day living lulls us into focusing on the little things and neglecting the big things, the most important things. I think we lose track of the sheer beauty of life, of creation, of God our creator, and how we have been created and gifted by God in amazing and mysterious and beautiful and glorious ways.
Long ago, a poet, a musician if you will, took time to ponder these things, to ponder life, to look deeply into our humanity. Understanding that we are created in the image of God, this poet expressed what he or she understood in Psalm 8:
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth!
You made your glory higher than heaven!
From the mouths of nursing babies
you have laid a strong foundation because of your foes,
in order to stop vengeful enemies.
When I look up at your skies,
at what your fingers made—
the moon and the stars that you set firmly in place—
what are human beings that you think about them;
what are human beings that you pay attention to them?
You’ve made them only slightly less than divine,
crowning them with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let them take charge over your handiwork,
putting everything under their feet—
all sheep and all cattle,
the wild animals too,
the birds in the sky,
the fish of the ocean,
everything that travels the pathways of the sea.
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth!
You are amazing! Only slightly less than divine! And God has handed you in all your amazing-ness, a special task: to take care of all that God has made. You are a caretaker of this world, just lower than God, and immensely important in the world God created. You are a crowned with glory and honor and power and majesty to be a steward. So consider your crown!
Consider your crown. That’s what I want to do today. I want to take a cue from the psalmist and consider how amazing and glorious and grand you are. Not to puff up your ego, but to help you (and me) realize the magnitude of being made by God in the image of God.
To make you in God’s image, it took over seventy-five trillion cells. In every one of those cells God wrote 6 feet of DNA with over 3 billion letters of coding using hundreds of thousands of molecules. The cells make up your bones and teeth, your hair and fingernails, you heart and liver and lungs and brain, your eyes and nose and ears and mouth, your spleen and gallbladder, even your tear ducts.
These cells contain your thoughts and memories, they mix together to form your personality, your disposition your habits and all the things that make you uniquely you. You are this unique and exotic blend of atoms that have been drifting through the universe for billions of years that God – through your parents – has assembled and configured and inspected and tuned precisely at this moment to be you.
You are shedding some of those atoms right now and they will become something else. They were something else before they became a part of you. Yesterday they were the cereal you ate for breakfast, the salad you ate for lunch or the steak you had for dinner. Before that maybe those atoms were a leaf or an earthworm or a rock or a chair or a palace or a mountain or Texas or a meteorite or a star!
That’s pretty cool to think about right… you used to be a star. After all God says from dust you came and to dust you shall return. We all used to be stars. We are made from star dust!
And part of you is returning to that dust as I speak. In fact, you lose fifty to a hundred and fifty strands of hair a day, you shed ten billion flakes of skin a day – in fact, almost all of the dust in your house is the dead skin you shed. Yeah, ponder that for a minute and feel free to vacuum and dust more often! Every twenty-eight days you get completely new skin, and every nine years your entire body is completely renewed.
Think about that – when Paul says anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, it’s not only spiritual, it’s very literal and physical. You are constantly being renewed because that is the way God made you to be.
Now what is crazy about this is that despite how much of you changes over time, you remain you. Your body, your cells, your DNA continues to keep you you. With every hair that falls, every cell that sheds and is replaced, every atom that is renewed, you continue to have the same shape….well roughly the same shape !! It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
Look at it this way: Consider an antique chair passed down from generations before you. At one point the rockers cracked and had to be replaced. At another point the seat busted and was re-made and re-installed. At another point the back of the chair fell off and had to be redone. You say this chair belonged to your great-great-great grand-something. But actually by the time the chair gets to you, none of the wood in the chair was actually part of the chair that your great-great-grand-something owned. The chair has been completely rebuilt. It’s the same chair. And yet it is a different chair.
You see, your great-great-grand-somethings chair is not actually the wood itself, but the chair is really the pattern.
And so are you. You are a pattern, moving through time, constantly changing and yet still consistent.
This may leave you to ask: So where exactly are you in your body? If you are constantly changing, that is, the matter that makes your physical body up is always being renewed and replaced, then what exactly is you? You are not the matter in your body because you are never exactly the same matter even from one moment to the next. You are something more than the matter that you see, the atoms that form your physical body, the cells that are uniquely configured together. You are something more.
Your body could be taken apart all the way down to the last atom, and yet we would never begin to locate the unique essence that we know to be you. Even though 9 years from now none of your atoms will be the same, at this moment that fit together, they belong to you, they are uniquely yours.
And yet you are more than the sum of all those atoms. None of those atoms or cells or organ or bones can really pinpoint who you are. You are something more – a pattern, an image, God’s image.
What’s even more is that you have been gifted with incredible power. Right now, your body is constantly radiating about 100 watts of energy into our surroundings, containing 7 quintillion joules of potential energy. For those who are not sure what a quintillion is it is 7 with 18 zeros behind it! And that amount of potential energy is equivalent to 30 large hydrogen bombs.
Yes, you are powerful! And you don’t even know how powerful you are!
You are amazing, glorious, grand, created to be a steward of this good creation, the earth and sky and stars that God set in place. You are just a little lower than God, the divine creator.
You are truly something more than you even think you are. Beautiful, complex, finely tuned and uniquely crafted and gifted by God. You are capable, talented, skilled, artistic, smart, funny, athletic, hard-working, passionate, creative, and sacred and powerful. With all your power and energy, you are able to do far more than you think you can. You are something more!
The question then is this:
What will you do with you?
What will the pattern, the image that you are show forth to the world?
What will you do with this something more that is you, the something more that God is calling you to be?