Vintage Glass

I am sitting on a love seat in a small bedroom on the third floor of Sweet Cane Inn in Natchitoches, Louisiana, sipping a cup of Community coffee and looking out a window that is original to this house constructed for Congressman Phanor Breazeale in the late 1800’s. My current vantage point allows a view of certain treetops near the Cane River, but I'm as much intrigued by the tall, narrow window as I am by the view it affords. Vintage glass always appeals to me. It is unquestionably imperfect, but it's very imperfection is what piques my interest. Images seen through vintage glass appear slightly distorted due to the ripple effect of the glaze itself. The aged glass adds texture to the light that filters through it and becomes a thing of beauty all it's own, without distracting from the image on the other side.

I can't help but think of this as a great commentary on the properly viewed and powerfully lived Christian existence. Our calling is to allow Christ to show through us, but the inescapable reality is that anything passing through us will be either slightly or greatly distorted by us.  That need not be completely negative, if indeed it's negative at all. God intends to use flawed human beings like you and me in showing himself to the world. Just like vintage glass, we add texture to the light that passes through us.  We may distort his image slightly, but Christ has to sound something like us and look something like us in order for people to understand him at all.  Without us as a filter, God remains an abstract thought, a truth to which we give assent but never know. Jesus speaks of this in his parable of the vine that we read about in John 15. He is the grapevine and we are the branches, and the only way the world will comprehend the value of the vine is by seeing and tasting the fruit that the branches produce.