In His Image

One of my art projects, done in Calligraphy. If you look carefully you will see that this is done by just writing the word peace continually for 5 lines so that it ends up with peace on all 4 sides.

IN HIS IMAGE
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer


Each individual will make a matchless discovery: he will be able to cease from constantly scrutinising the other person, judging him, condemning him, putting him in his particular place where he can gain ascendancy over his brother and thus doing violence to him as a person. Now he can allow the brother to exist as a completely free person, as God made him to be. His view expands and, to his amazement, for the first time he sees, shining within his brother, the richness of God's created glory.

God did not make this person as I would have made him. He did not give him to me as a brother for me to dominate and control, but in order that I might find within him the creator. Now the other person, in the freedom in which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction.

God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather than in his very freedom from me God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God's image should appear in others. That image always manifests a new and unique form that comes solely from God's free and sovereign creation. To me the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every man in the likeness of His Son, the Crucified. After all, even that image certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grasped it.

Strong and weak, wise and foolish, gifted and ungifted, pious or unpious, the diverse individuals in the community are no longer incentives for talking and judging or condemning, and thus excuses for self-justification. They are rather cause for rejoicing in one another and serving one another.