Who Do You Say I Am?

What do you really look like? That’s not such an easy question to answer. Do you look like the rumpled, morning-breath figure that stares back at you in the mirror first thing in the morning? Is that you? Or do you look like your picture from Glamour Shots?

My family has a few pictures of me growing up, and I desperately hope I did not really look like that. The worst one of all captured me in all my hormonal glory with a zit-erupted face. It was a close-up — almost as if they used a fish-eye lens! I looked like a camel with measles!

People look at us in ways we never see ourselves, three-dimensionally from a 360-degree orbit. We look only at our two-dimensional selves, face-on in the mirror — a controlled environment that allows us to edit our appearance and expressions. Everyone else gets the first draft before we ever have the chance to make corrections.

What other people see is what you see when you watch a videotape of yourself. You know, the one you watch with your hand covering your face in embarrassment, screaming, “Fast-forward it! Fast-forward it!”

But then your loving family member decides to torment you further and puts the video on pause right in the middle of you saying the word “prune” so your lips are splayed partway open and your eyes sag partway closed. There sits your image, freeze-framed for the whole world to watch, like you’re just about to lay a slurpy kiss on the wrong end of a tuba.

Imagine having someone make a series of a hundred still photos from that video of yourself. That’s what you look like to other people. To them you are hundreds of animated still photos that somehow their minds add together and use to calculate an average. An image of you that is somewhere in between all the rest. Not very flattering. But not the worst image of you either.

In that sense, the image other people have of you is probably the closest to what you really look like. Certainly a lot closer than that one shot of you taken 10 years earlier and 30 pounds slimmer that is still “your favorite.” Your lying favorite.

The fact is we need other people’s view of us to know what we really look like and who we really are.

My all-time worst photograph captured me explaining something to my wife, Margie, while sitting at a banquet somewhere. There I was “enlightening” her with my “great wisdom” about two inches from her face. There was no hint of anger in my expression, but I was clearly the “superior one,” the chest-thumping male baboon. I didn’t even notice at the time what I later came to hate about myself: I was the know-it-all helping the world to think correctly — the world, unfortunately for Margie, being the nearest set of ears to listen.

There came a time when I couldn’t bear to look at that picture and actually prayed that I would no longer be the person in that photograph. Gratefully I was forced to see myself through that camera lens, and Margie’s eyes.

No matter how hard it may be, the truest view of ourselves is one brought to us from others. From God’s Spirit first and then from people around us.

Recently I’ve been reading some humbling documents written by so-called “Third-World” Christian leaders who share their views and suspicions about the North American church. They, and the people they represent, often find themselves on the receiving end of efforts from “our” ministry organizations to guide them in what to believe and how to practice their Christian faith.

Yet these carefully and skillfully written documents question the credibility of the North American church. They point out that we are arguably the most culturally compromised, morally tainted and theologically skewed region of worldwide Christendom and, therefore, less likely to know what we are talking about when it comes to true faith or faithful sacrifice for the name of Jesus.

Agree or disagree, that is how we are seen by multitudes of Christians around the world. The question is whether we are willing to see ourselves as they do — too often acting like superior dispensers of wisdom — in order to have a sober estimate of ourselves. Or will we choose the Glamour Shots version?