receiving

The little girl who we saw sing in the Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony was not actually singing. Another girl was. The one we saw was judged as cuter.
That was deceiving.

The idea that the Olympics represents unity goes wrong when we face the fact that the Chinese government shut down many factories and did not find work for those put out of work; many houses were bulldozed to build the Olympic village, and those people who lost their homes now live in complete poverty with no homes at all.
That was deceiving, too.

Much of the fireworks in the same ceremony were computer generated, not real. They were only shown to the worldwide audience and the people actually in the Stadium in Beijing never saw the virtual fireworks that the TV audience witnessed.
Well, I guess this is also some sort of deceiving.

We human beings sometimes overcome ourselves in the art of not being transparent to each other. Because what we’ve seen from China, we can notice all over the world. Deceiving comes in a form of ingeniously developed events as well as ingeniously developed excuses. Cute face choosing as well as cute lies for personal interests. Weak principles demonstration as well as weak consideration shown in our daily relationships.

We humans are good at deceiving.

But there’s one place where none of these win any gold: heaven. Before God, none of us get to deceive, cheat or lie. No matter how many fireworks of good deeds we let off, no matter how cute is our face of righteousness. And, trying to imitate Summer Olympics Committee, who wrote ‘The Republic of Taipei’ in Taiwan’s banner, because China has determined that ‘Taiwan’ has no existence, we try unsuccessfully to determine that our mistakes don’t exist.
Because He is good at revealing.

But there’s another quality God is also good at: receiving. He is always with arms wide open, wider than Phelps’s strokes, to receive the deceived human beings, who want to get close to his love and, by faith, receive all the good things he has prepared for the one who loves Him. Through Jesus Christ, who for winning our victory went not to the highest place of the podium, but to the highest pain and death-but coming alive again-, we always can be sure that, whenever we get deceiving ourselves or others, he always is ready to be receiving. Then, in His arms and guided by his love, we can keep running in our ‘Life Olympic’ challenges.

A receiving without ceremony. And where everything is real.


(from an Ilustration os the text reviser
Kim Starr
Deaconess Intern
St. Louis, USA)

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