You. #nofilter

Worst thing ever: Turning on your cell phone to take a picture, only to find the camera flipped and your double chin filling the screen.

This has been one of those weeks of me doing things and then thinking daaah! Self-centered! I have felt really self-centered this week, when what I really want to be is selfless.

What I need is for my 19-year-old son to come along with his iPhone, which he argues is magnificently superior to my Samsung (whatever) –then take a picture of me and do that filter magic he’s so good at.

Crop.

Manipulate  the color.

I don’t care what –just make me look better.

Because really the worst thing ever is wanting to be blameless and realizing you have a long journey yet. Like when my son hikes with Mitch and asks him, “How much farther?” and Mitch always says, “a healthy half mile,” even if there are six miles left going straight up a mountain.

A healthy half mile is about how far away I am from being a selfless person.

I’m reading Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, and he’s making me feel less alone with these words:

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way.

We were so hoping to be good people. Then the camera flips, and we see what we really are.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

(Romans 3:23a NIV)

The other day we were talking about a movie star who ruined her face with Botox. She just ruined it. But I understand that she wanted to look better. We all want to look better.

I find myself coming back to this inescapable knowledge, however, that I am a person who falls short of keeping the Rule of Decent Behavior, as Lewis calls it. I have to admit that I keep falling short.

Me. No filter.

Then I remember that I desperately need Jesus to transform me on the inside, because I cannot do it on my own. I need him to make me better –not just to look better like a well-doctored picture –but truly to be a better person.

So let the camera flip toward selfie, and may what we see there cause us to say to Jesus, as I do to my son with the iPhone: “Can you do something with this?”

Sincerely,

Christy #notarrivedyet

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