The Iron and the Photograph

 As I began my day, sitting quietly, breathing in, breathing out, in a effort to still my racing mind to meditate and think about my life, Yahshua and just be still, I looked up and saw my iron and a framed photograph of me and my parents sitting on top of the high boy on the other side of the room.

As I looked, I saw the shadow of each reflected on the wall behind them and thoughts of, “What’s real and what is not,” swept through my mind.  Looking at the reflection of the iron behind it, I thought, “The iron is real, “ and the same thing about the framed photograph of me and my parents.  The Word also came to mind that tells us that, “We see but dimly now,” as though, “looking into the reflection in a mirror.”  So, the reflections of those two objects on the wall are us, you and I, “but dim reflections of who we really are, I concluded.”

But my mind didn’t stop there.  My gaze returned to the “real” objects; the solid iron and the framed photograph and I then thought, “Even those objects that I’ve classified as real, they aren’t real, but casings that cover, enshroud, dress what is real….the essence of life and what causes each to function found deep within, in a place that cannot be seen by the naked eye.”  I questioned this conclusion because surely, the electrical current and alive energy within the iron can’t be the same as the picture within the frame?

My thoughts got deeper and my mind said, “Look, really look at the photograph.  What do you see with your essence, your mind’s eye?”  Looking deeply, allowing the rationalizing mind to continue to argue with myself, just letting those thoughts drift, allowing them to be….I saw within the frame, within the photograph the captured life essence of three very real, very alive essences.  I saw a captured reflection, a clothed image of an essence that could not be seen by the naked eye.  I found the photograph and the iron were indeed the same – it was just that the photograph had the extra layer over it; it was doubly encased….but the life force, the essence was still there.  I just had to look deeper with my mind’s eye.

Returning to where I sat, bringing my mind back to the moment, I thought, “Life, just how deep do the layers of what we call life go?  Is life, like the photograph, is it clothed by many layers?”  And then even now as I write this rambling blog, I think of the Scripture found in Genesis when Adam and Eve blew it and the L-rd fashioned clothing from animal skins to hide their nakedness.  I’ve long since concluded that it wasn’t actually clothing as we know it today, but in fact it was the skin and bone that is our skeletal frame.  For you see, Adam and Eve communed with the L-rd before their fall, and I believe what we are told in the Word that, “only Spirit can know Spirit,” and that we, being made in His image, we are Spirit.

Mankind has been around for a very long time.  How many layers have we added to cover up the essence of who we are; to protect ourselves from some prey, some fear, some darkness that threatens to engulf us?  Am I even more layered than that photograph of me and my parents?  How many layers have to be stripped away from me, that my Spirit, my essence might be free?

There is another simple Scripture that tells us that, “Whomever the L-rd sets free, is free indeed.”  For me, where I am at this moment, that freedom is the ability to be “unencased, unclothed,” by the things of the world that weigh me (us) down, that burden us and keep us from rising up, from just being who we are; from knowing who we are….”  These things, what are they?  Perhaps they are the following:

• fear
• anger
• jealousy
• hatred
• lust – for power, things, even love?

Are these the things that currently keep humankind clothed and blind to our own essence….keep us always on the surface?

An iron and a framed photograph.  Who would have thought that such could evoke such deep thought?  You just never know what you will hear when you say, “Speak L-rd, here am I.”