THE MASTERPIECE

Imagine, you are at your kitchen table. The 3D model you’ve worked on so long and hard is finally in the last stages. You hold your breath as the last piece goes on. You hold it up to the light as if it is flying through the air. It is completely beautiful. The color scheme is brilliant. It has perfect form. Beaming with excitement you carefully set it on the table and go to bed, proud of your accomplishment…

If you think about it, there are a lot of things in life that seem to crush us. Maybe losing a friend or loved one. Maybe something else. Whatever it is, it feels like we can’t go on. This can make us feel a lot of different feelings. One of those being failure. We may start to feel like we are weak. We think, “every one else has the same problems, but I can’t take it as well as they do.”

I would like to point some things out.

It may seem like the others are handling their problems better, but the enemy of our souls is the master of deception. Meaning, Satan may try to make it look like others can handle their situations better, they really can’t: everyone has a breaking point. Another thing, although it is true that others may be going through something, it is not guaranteed to be the same thing.

There are always two sides to a road, and we can also drive off the other side.

This side of the road may sound something like, “No one else has problems like I do; I’m the only one.” This is also a lie for the same reason: every person has had at least one problem.

Here is something that helps me when I start to feel this way.

The Masterpiece.

“What in the world are you talking about,” you may ask. I will get to that in a minute. But before I do, I would like to revisit at our imaginary creation for a moment.

Before you put the pieces together they were just flat pieces of metal. Before that they were just one long piece of sheet metal (unless it was paper or cardboard). So what is my point? If we were to watch the fast-forwarded journey of that creation, we would see three major stages.

1. A rock (or a tree).

2. Sheet form

3. The finished product.

In between those stages, the rock is crushed, melted, made stronger with other metals mixed in with it, formed, cooled, cut, and finally put together. When it started out it looked like a plain ordinary chunk of metal, or just an ordinary tree. But when it is finished it looks nothing at all like its original form.

It is a Masterpiece.

Similarly, we can see this in our lives.

The way we start out may be ugly and formless; our day to day lives filled with sin.

BUT GOD...

He made a way through Jesus’ death and resurrection so that, even though we have imperfections here on earth, we will someday be made perfect. The trials we go through are just like the fire that melts the metal into form. Even though we may not be able to see it now, we are being made into a true masterpiece. And no matter what, Jesus will be right there beside us.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10

This is a paper model of a Boeing 727. Main page photo and blog video are digitally edited versions of this photo.