Meet God. Get to know Him. Bear a close resemblance to Him and through you the Holy Spirit will change the lives of the people next to you.
A few months ago I went to see a very nice space exhibition by NASA. I’m not a space fanatic but technology has always intrigued me so I kept running from one item to the next, often only reading the captions on the explanation screens. It was half way through the exhibition that I realized that quite a few of the items were in fact replicas. Some of them were used by NASA at some point but others served only for display purposes.
As it turns out, museums do this all the time. For preservation, restoration, logistic or security reasons they often display copies of the artifacts instead of the originals. If it weren’t for the small text on the information sign the vast majority of visitors would never be able to tell the difference anyway. The copies are that good. Not to mention that throughout the years a lot of what were once considered original artifacts have turned out to be very good copies.
And that’s the thing with us, people and replicas – if they are a good representation what we see is the original. It’s a very different story, however when you pay the premium price for a mobile phone and you get a $15 iPhane in the mail. Or when the sole of your running shoes falls off on the 2nd day you wear them to only remind you that you actually purchased a pair of Adibas. We’re swamped with cheap imitations nowadays. So much so that the concept of representation or imitation carries a mostly negative connotation.
How about our lives and our faith – are we imitators or are we thinking, breathing and acting as cheap imitations? Let’s look at Paul’s first letter to the church in Thessalonica and see what the differences are between these two.