Squeaky Clean

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Last week Louisa impressed me by washing all the windows in my cottage, inside and out. She carefully locked each one afterwards in preparation for winter winds and removed the screens, carrying them to the basement for storage. The window glass is so clean it seems there isn’t any at all, like we’re living among the trees. And it’s absolutely lovely.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our inner selves could be that squeaky clean with no smudges or smears?

Today at an early morning prayer gathering during which a group of us were interceding for others, God reminded me I needed to spend more time in prayers of confession for myself. He reminded me that just because I don’t shoplift or embezzle money or worship idols, I’m still guilty of sin, and it needs to be cleaned up every so often.

Job of the Old Testament is a tremendous role model for all of us. God’s description of him was “blameless,” meaning he lived a life without willful sin. But he wasn’t the only one. Dotted through Scripture are others of the same caliber such as both parents of John the Baptist who were also labeled “blameless.” And several others referred to themselves as being blameless before God.

Whenever I ask the Lord if he sees anything in me that’s blame-worthy, his answer is always, “Yes,” followed by the specifics. It’s as if he says, “The window to your soul has gotten cloudy. How ‘bout cleaning it off?”

All of us want to be clean before God, but it’s hard to agree with him about specific smudges. Most of us jump to defend ourselves, even to him. And maybe that’s the main reason he’s never referred to someone like me as “blameless.” Maybe Job and the others didn’t self-defend but instead quickly responded to God’s charges with ownership of guilt and immediate requests for forgiveness.

Each of us is born with a sense of right and wrong, along with a conscience to prompt us. We can choose to run from wrong or walk as close to it as possible. But God can look at our hearts as easily as I can look through my clean windows. He sees everything in there, and is keenly interested in all of it, though he’s looking at one thing above all others: our intentions.

Despite the smudges and smears on the glass, if our honest longing is to be clean before him, his response is always to pull out his supernatural Windex and work washing wonders within us. He deals harshly with willful sin but lavishes grace when our underlying purpose is to please him.

So, although I’d love to be “blameless” before God, until I get there, I’ll work on just being “squeaky clean,” much like Louisa’s windows.

Lord, “keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression.” (Psalm 19:13)

Beautiful People

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Yesterday’s post prompted thoughtful comments from readers, both visible on the site and invisible via the contact button. Apparently facial symmetry fascinates all of us and has much to do with how beautiful or handsome we appear to the general public.

Scientists and poll-takers have started a debate about perfect faces, joining plastic surgeons and make-up artists, who’ve already been there for decades. Researching on line, I learned that precious few people are born beautiful.

Brad Pitt and Kate Moss are supposedly two examples of perfection. Their faces have been measured by experts and found to be exactly even in feature dimensions. In other words, neither of them have a “bad side” when they walk Hollywood’s red carpet. It’s just all good.

My friend Terry, a mathematical genius, blog-commented that she’s also studied facial symmetry and has experimented with her high school students. “I had them bring in a picture of their faces as frontally dead-on as possible. Then they put a mirror down in the middle of the picture to see what they’d look like if they were symmetrical. Rarely did it improve the look.”

Fascinated, I went on line to check her statement, because scientists were claiming that all of us are naturally drawn to perfectly balanced faces. Louisa and I found web sites displaying celebrity photos in which a person’s good side was mirror-imaged and put in place of his/her bad side.

Terry was right. They all looked a little off, like an altered version of the faces we knew.

Terry went one observation further. In her classroom experiment with mirrors, she asked students to note the age-difference from one side to the other: “There’s an ‘old’ and a ‘young’ side to each face, depending on which way the mirror is facing, though it might not be apparent in the very old or very young.”

The most famous example of this is Abraham Lincoln’s face as carved in stone inside Washington DC’s Lincoln Memorial. I remember as a child, running from one side to the other, checking on what Dad had told us: “The sculptor wanted to show Lincoln’s inner struggle as president. One side looks old and exhausted, representing war. The other looks youthful and rested, reflecting peace.” It was true, although from the front, Lincoln still looked like Lincoln.

The last comment Terry made, however, was the best: “Since the Holy of Holies and heaven itself are described as a perfect cube, I can only assume that all math will be redeemed in eternity, and perfect symmetry will be restored from the effects of the curse.”

Astounding thought!

And Terry, whether or not your face has two good sides, you’ve got Brad and Kate beat with your mathematical genius. That is both good and beautiful!

The angel “showed me the holy city. When he measured it, he found it was a square, as wide as it was long. In fact, its length and width and height were each 1,400 miles.” (Revelation 2:10,16)

Handmade is better.

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It took many years for me to realize one of my ears was lower than the other. But when every pair of glasses I ever bought tipped the same direction, I finally gave up criticizing the glasses and figured it was me.

In another dimension dilemma, one leg is longer than the other. If new slacks need shortening, one side always needs a tad more than the other. Eventually I was forced to acknowledge I was just plain crooked.

But that isn’t all bad. Instead it’s an indication I was handmade, just like pottery created on a wheel, a quilt made on a stretcher or a drinking glass blown by mouth. And that’s the definition of unique: no two alike.

Although we all love handmade when it comes to home decor and baked goods, faces are another matter. In that category we strive for parallel perfection, one side mirroring the other. Years ago I had a conversation with a plastic surgeon and asked about facial symmetry. “It doesn’t exist,” he said. I suspected as much.

People, especially women, kept him in business by paying him to rearrange their asymmetrical faces, altering one side or the other to make them match. Surgical changes are tricky, though, and despite precise scalpel work, perfection remains elusive.

God creates each of us unlike anybody else. He gave us unique fingerprints, already visible on the hands of an unborn baby at 14 weeks in utero. He also designs unique irises for each of us, and even our tongue prints are one-of-a-kind.

Individuality is important to God. He could simply “poof” us into existence but instead chooses to design us. According to Scripture, he personally makes “all the delicate parts” of our bodies (Psalm 139) with thought and supernatural effort, including our symmetry or asymmetry. Surely he could put together a bodily perfect human being, and yet he doesn’t. Might it have something to do with handing us opportunities to accept his will over our own? Or possibly offering us a chance to become content with less than perfection?

I’ve been remiss over the years, whining about my physical flaws to my kids. The result of that false pride was their inaccurate opinion that I was judging them the same way, which I wasn’t. But that was the prideful part, focusing on myself. With their patient corrections, I’ve stopped self-criticizing… at least audibly.

It occurred to me my dissatisfaction with the ways God has made me unique is probably disrespectful to him, maybe even disloyal, which makes me feel awful. I hope I can eventually get it through my crooked head that being handmade by God is an incredible gift, bi-level ears and all.

“My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.” (Psalm 139:15)