Spilled Salt: Pixel

Last night my wife and I were privileged enough to be able to attend and Olympic event, on Cypress Mountain. We watched 12 crazy minded female souls fling themselves off 3 metre high jumps, hurdling themselves another 3 metres in the air, flip and twist around in some choreographed magical routine, land, and ski out. They call this: aerials. A very appropriate name I must say.

We were amongst 9000 other spectators at the event, and perhaps countless others watching the event on TV. Being in a crowd that large, on such a small mountain is a bit of a staggering feeling. We were standing pretty close to the action, right up at a fence, as close as we could get. I at one point looked back behind me — and saw the massive crowd all starring into the sky, trying to follow the crazed jumpers.

I was reminded of my apparent insignificance as one just one person.

Then once the event was finished, everyone had to get off the mountain via the 2010 bus network, and as you can imagine all 9000 people up and left and jammed the walkways in a brief instant. And like cattle we were herded down the correct corridor, and about a kilometre away, we arrived at the buses.

I was also reminded that I am not alone.

Just before the buses, where the line had slowed, we met a nice couple from Atlanta, Georgia who had travelled here for this one event. They were a very nice couple, with a cute little kid. We got talking about the event that we just watched and about the breakfast at the hotel they so much enjoyed — as well as the cost of the three of them getting here.

I am reminded that I am not meant to be alone.

Have you ever looked really close at a digital picture, perhaps using Photoshop or some other sort of image editing program? And you see right down to the individual pixels?

pix•el
[pik-suh l, -sel]
–nounComputers, Television.
“The smallest element of an image that can be individually processed in a video display system.”
(www.dictionary.com)

That smallest element is you.
That smallest element is me.

And by ourselves, on our own, yes — we just might be a tiny plain square.
And with others, all around us, we paint this glorious picture known as shared lives.

I have been doing a bunch of reading lately on building relationships, of course in my discipline of building relationships with youth — but what I am finding (to no real surprise) that these concepts have a greater meaning of building relationships in general with others.

The point of one author (Andrew Root: Relationships Unfiltered), is that we build relationships not on the premise of influence, but on the premise of desiring relationship — to be with another person, to share life with someone else, kind of like how Jesus was when he was on earth. Surely a crazy concept.

Going back to the pixel imagery, my color of pixel cannot change the color of the pixel beside me, there isn’t that connection — I didn’t create that pixel, it just appeared beside me. When you see my pixel in a group of other pixels, this picture forms, not because my pixel changed another pixel, but because we worked together and formed something greater than just ourselves.

The Lord said in Genesis 2:18, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

This phrase “not good” — implies something more than unsatisfactory or unacceptable. It was not pleasing to God that man was alone; God couldn’t see his creation act and live the way it was designed. Its original meaning calls into an understanding of morality, almost implying that it was just plain wrong that man was alone.

So God’s solution was that another form would be created, woman — Eve, which means “life.”

God brought “life” to man, when he formed a relationship for him. This couple was then to live in community with each other and with others as they “filled the earth.”

Our instruction is the same, to live in community, to not be alone, to fill the earth.

We have life because we have each other.

So now — let’s share life with each other, and leave that changing/influence stuff up to the Guy who knows what He’s doing.