When I was in college, I considered proper appearance for myself to be “ivy league.” For me, that meant every hair in place, black rim glasses, pen holder in shirt pocket with a notepad, casual slacks of different conservative colors with coordinated colors of sport jackets, and of course shirts with the button down collar. It seemed to me the final touch of intelligent sophistication for such a “cool” dude would be to smoke a pipe with a good, sweet smelling tobacco. So, I got me a pipe and proceeded to try different kinds of pipe tobacco to find the one that smelled the best, for I did enjoy smelling a good pipe. Well, the first thing I discovered was that when you smoke a pipe, no matter how good a fragrance it produces, you can’t smell it, at least, I could not. So, that’s the first thing that proved to be counter-productive in the new adventure, but I figured, that’s ok, there are other benefits other than smelling it, although I was quite disappointed in not being able to smell it. I settled on a certain type tobacco, and proceeded to “perfect my style.” My next discovery was that no matter how careful you are, invariably you are going to inadvertently bump that pipe so the red hot ashes come flying out. It did not take long before I had burned a hole in every fine pair of polyester slacks that I had, along with those handsome polyester sport jackets. I tried to figure out a way to fix them, but no matter what you did, there was an obvious flaw in the garments of Mr. Perfect. I was certainly not made of money to keep buying clothes in college, so in due time I had to abandon the idea of developing the cool, calm, image with the smoking of a pipe.
Sometimes in life, things are just not what they seem to be, and our best recourse is to just abandon that particular pursuit. It is easy to invest a lot of intellectual pursuit and proper sounding religious verbage to make ourselves feel like we are really playing the part in a good way. And, we can be quite happy in what we are doing until we begin to realize that God has called us to a supernatural walk with him that goes beyond what we think. His plan and purpose is for us to actually follow Jesus Christ in the way he did things through his communion with his heavenly Father and the power of the Holy Spirit. When we realize that we have just been religiously burning holes in our pants, and shirts, and jackets, then we can stop the show and really get rid of those things in our lives that is causing harm, and start new with the wardrobe of God. There is one true “image” that is needful, and that is walking with God in faith, love, and holiness, obeying him each day.
