You are an original…

I write plenty of emails in my day-to-day life.  Often I click on the ‘cc’ tab to send ‘carbon copies’ to extra recipients.  I wonder how many of us remember the times when we placed a sheet of ‘carbon paper’ between sheets of typing paper?  We would whack those keys on the typewriter and the second sheet would automatically be a carbon copy of the original letter.  Put three sheets of paper and another sheet of carbon paper and whack the keys really hard and you could get two copies!

What about another memory?  Going to school in the 1960’s and 1970’s and the smell of the Gestetner copy machine solvents wafting up the corridors and into the classrooms.  We all knew when our homework was being printed.  Oh, what you younger generations have missed!

But in those days the ‘copies’ were always a little fuzzy around the edges.  Adequate copies, but not like the original.  We live in a world that seems to want us to be carbon copies of something else.  Often our attempts to aspire to greatness or beauty rely on an ‘original’ we would like to be like. 

Let’s not do that.  In that ancient Book we are reminded every one of us is “awe inspiringly and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139).  We are each unique.  But it gets better.  Our very essence is in the image of the one who designed and created all things.