Do You Have God in Your DNA?

There's a church that I pass most mornings in my neighborhood (unless I go a different way so I can buy coffee!) that has one of those ever-changing metallic letter boards with messages or sermon titles or just passing whimsies--I'm not sure which. This week the message is this: Do You Have God in Your DNA? Now often the messages on this board strike me as a little trite or unrefined, but I think this week's poses an interesting question. After all, as humans, we associate DNA with the very basis of our individuality, our makeup, the thing that makes us who we are. Now I don't really think that God has "DNA", per se, but what would it mean for God to impart divine individuality or eternal order and makeup into who we are. Well, of course, God has. After all, we are "made in God's image". God has made us who we are and who we will be and breathed a part of the Godself into us.

So what does it mean to make one in your image? I think it means to imagine what they will be, to impart a piece of your own self into them (much like an artist or a composer putting all that they know and all that they have and all that they are into a masterwork). I think that's what God has done in creating each of us--imparted a piece of the Godself, a piece of the Divine into us, a DNA, if you will, that is not of this existence, but of one to come. God did not create us and then leave us to our own devices. We are not inventions engineered to certain specifications. We are, rather, artistic and musical renderings that are affected by time and space and the definitive input of those who cross our path, those who play us or repaint us or just enjoy the fact that we're here. But somewhere deep within our being is a part of God, an image that is not our Creation, an order that is not our doing, and an individuality that we share only with the One who breathed us into being.

So go forth and be the image buried deep within your DNA...

Grace and Peace,
Shelli