Behind the facade


Sometime ago, I had the idea to make this new kind of blog banner.


 
I cleaned up my desktop and artfully arranged a few things. All that was left was to take a few photos, and then add lettering. Simple right?

But getting the shot of the desktop proved challenging.

Notice the furry tail at the bottom.
 
That would be Isabelle. I can crop her out, I thought. I took a few more pictures.

Then, have-to-be-in-the-middle-of-absolutely-everything-Wilbur approaches. I can crop him out, too.
 
However, I still didn’t have the photo I wanted. I kept trying.

And then―the wrecking ball.


 
He just can’t help himself.

I had to restage the desktop and start over.

Sigh.

But hey, just looking at the banner at the top, you wouldn’t guess the drama, would you?

Sometimes behind the artfully arranged façade, challenges abound.

I struggle with how much some of us are living our lives on the internet these days―how much I am doing that.  I sure don’t want to live my life just to take a picture of it.

I wrestle with what to share, yet I want to be real, to be honest, and not just put the shiny moments out there.

I love beauty. It heals me. It helps me. So, in my pictures, I try to share beauty, because I think it is healing. But much of my life is anything but a photo op.

When my daughter was little and she played with Barbie dolls, I told her that nobody’s body looked like a Barbie's body. Real people had scars, sags and so very many imperfections.

Nobody’s life looks like an Instagram or Facebook page, either. Yet, some may think their life should be like that. Let me put this in all caps. YOUR LIFE WILL NEVER BE PICTURE PERFECT.

In everyone’s life there’s going to be a wrecking ball that will turn over all the carefully arranged plans.

However, what we can do is ask God to show us what he would do through our toppled trophies. The picture may not wind up on a Facebook page, but then, maybe it will. As I shared in this post a couple of weeks ago, if we let them, those seeming interruptions can set the course for a completely new kind of life.

So, the banner is up, the desktop is back to being a little cluttered, and Wilbur, well, he’s still a wrecking ball. If he ever had an Instagram page, we’d call it Wilbur the Cat: Calamity, Chaos, and Catastrophe. No façade of perfection with him.

"People look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart" (I Samuel16:7).