Created in the image of God

Traveling to school a few weeks ago, I heard on the radio a discussion of the sport of track and field. The person on the radio was speaking of the great benefits of track and field. It is in his description the best sport to be involved in. If you want to be a real athlete you need to run track. Only the real athletes could handle the difficult training regimen that involves the dreaded intervals. These are a series of laps that one has to run. I did run track briefly in high school and I can attest to the odious character of these intervals. In Football one had to do something really bad like forget your helmet to have to run what the track athletes did everyday. I must confess I quit track before the end of the season, but it wasn’t because of the intervals, not that they were something I really liked. For me it was not even the humiliation of running the 100 yard dash as a freshman against what must have been the fastest men in America. The gun went off and my dignity would have been better preserved had I pretended to have been struck by the shot. I felt like I was running backwards, and in fact I probably gave off that impression to the spectators. The competition was not the reason I quite track. It was the shorts. If you have ever worn track shorts you know what I am talking about. They are just so short. I did not compare to the other track athletes. To think of myself as one was to find a quick way to a very low self esteem. There is a common challenge we all face. How do we understand who we are. If we understand ourselves primarily in terms of biology, of life, then our focus will be solely on the length and quality of living. If we focus on psychological understandings of our personhood then our focus will be on having healthy relationships, meaning getting what we want out of others. How you feel. If your focus is on sociology then what will be most important is where you come from, and what you are leaving behind your legacy. If your answer to the question who am I, can only be answered from these perspectives then you will in my opinion live a life of despair. It may be quiet, it may not be quiet despair. But these aspects of our personhood are insufficient to explain the complexity and depth of what it is to be you. Genesis gives a different message. And the Lord said, “let us create man in our image.”