Gilding the Statue

Half-way through yesterday, my college-student son sent me a text.  "Hey Mom.  Did you know the government shut down?"  He knows I'm not always up to date on the latest current events and likes to keep me informed.  The whole shutdown situation, however, has prompted me to check the news a little closer this week.

This evening, I was looking at the New York Times app on my iPhone and saw the oddest thing.  Long story short, a restoration of the General Sherman statue in Central Park has been underway.  It was painstakingly covered with 1,200 square feet of gold leaf.  What sounds really crazy, at least to this sparkly girl, is that it was too shiny.  To correct the shininess problem, gilders were hired to glaze the statue with darker glazes.  It gets interesting here.  The dark glaze "did not dull the gold.  It accentuated it."  The dark glaze brought out all the detail of the statue.  It made it better and more "human".

It is a stretch, I know, but when I read about gilding the statue, I kept thinking, "We beheld His glory."  I looked up the verse just to be sure.  "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.  John 1:14 KJV  That statue restoration has provided an unintentional demonstration of a Biblical principle.  When our Lord Jesus came to earth, He was filled with the glory of God, and had a luster to Him that rivaled those streets of gold to which He was accustomed.  Not even the dirt and dust of this earth could dull that shine.  Instead, it brought out the details and made His Father easier to recognize.  Jesus didn't dull the glory of God.  He accentuated it.

I love some sparkle, and "Have a super sparkly day!" could easily be a theme for me.  Not one of my jewels, not one of my rhinestone sparkles, however, can rival the sparkle that comes from Jesus inside, reflecting the glory of God through the dust of this world.  After a long, hard day, I don't feel exactly sparkly, but that does not matter one bit.  What matters is whether or not the grime of the world dulled the luster of my Lord shining through me.