“HEY, PUT DOWN THAT CAMERA!!!”

The last thing you want is for some camera happy person to try to capture you in a bad moment, only to try to make you look like a loser.

OK, I’m not a celebrity. Not by any means. I’m just a pastor and a professor. I am a public figure though.

I can’t tell you how many times I have run into someone, and they have known who I am, but it is clear that I have no idea whom I’m meeting. Part of that comes from being a pastor in a larger church, you just can’t know everyone. But one of my classes was online once. And it was a video class.

I remember one man coming up to me and telling me that I was his prof, but I had never met him. It was neat, but it was also a wake up call.

It reminded me of what celebrities must feel. How they must live publicly in an image crafted for them. I must admit, this seems really hard.

But let’s also admit, Hollywood isn’t always to blame, we are. We want them to live that image. Somehow, it makes us feel different about ourselves.

What is it in us that makes us want to be someone else? I’m convinced that this is spiritual issue.

You see, Satan loves for us to think we are less then children of God. He wants so desperately for us to feel like we are not good enough to be loved by God. He uses everything he can to make us feel this way. He loves for us to be the paparazzi of our own faits, trying to catch little moments and distort them so that we feel less than worthy of love.

So how can we avoid this?

Realize Hollywood shows true moments, buy often deletes the truth.

What is true, is not always the truth. WAIT? What does that mean?
Try this sometime, take a video with your phone. Then bring it up to watch. Move along the video timeline and then pause it. If you are a little knowledgable, you can scrub back and forth on the video. You can take a video completely out of context by the image you stop on.

This is what Satan does for us. Just like in the movies, you can take a shot of your life, and distort it, moving it out of the truth of the reality and causing those seeing the snapshot to have a distorted view.

You may have made a bad decision, but that is only a snapshot of the video. God loves you beyond that moment. It is a moment, it does not define you. Look at the story line, you are loved by God and worthy of it.

Put God’s camera lens on you.

Don’t look through the eyes of the world. Movies distort reality, cameras pick what they want to focus on and even social media presents a crafted image that is so not real.

But God’s lens sees you as He created you. He says in the scriptures that He took effort and loving care to craft you into the person you are. You are not an accident. You are a priceless masterpiece. See what your creator sees, not what the world wants to see so that they can feel better about themselves.

Your take away.

You are so worthy of love. You always have been, and God has always loved you… no matter what.

Your question for the week.

What lens are you using to look at yourself? Do you filter who you are, through what people want you to be?