Warm Light - Cold Shadow

Warm Light - Cold Shadow 

I’ve noticed that I cast a warm favorable light when I trust and a cold shadow when I don’t. And I’m fairly sure neither is right and I presume I’m not alone.

The light I throw is rarely pure. It gets filtered through my need, my loyalty, my shared history, or the quiet hope that this person will not fail me. Under that warm light, flaws soften. Motives are given the benefit of the doubt. I see the best possible version—sometimes a version that could never be lived up to.

When the shadow falls, it comes from a colder place in me. Once trust is withdrawn, the same person is seen through an entirely different lens. Every word is weighed for deceit. Every action is assumed to hide a darker purpose. The light that once flattered now refuses to touch them at all. What was once excused is now condemned; what was once invisible becomes the only thing visible.

Both views are incomplete.

Perhaps the clearest view of a man is from below—not from the pedestal once placed under him, nor from the pit later dug for him. From below he is seen as he actually stands: finite, limited, capable of both good and failure, bearing the same human weight we all carry. From that low place it becomes harder to mistake him for a god, and harder to curse him as a devil.

Scripture is relentless on this point. The Lord has never asked us to look for gods in men. He has asked us to look for the image of God in men—and to remember that the image is still being formed, still incomplete, still subject to the same temptations that work on all of us. When perfection is demanded of those trusted, they are set up for a fall that is almost inevitable. When no light is allowed to remain in those who have disappointed, the door is closed on the very mercy each of us will one day need.

I’m that man! Putting a pedestal beneath myself one moment for the good I see, and in the next, a voluntary leap from the pedestal into the pit I’ve dug for all the weakness and faults I know are there.

Warm light and cold shadow are both born of my own heart. The clearer sight is the one that refuses both extremes: that sees a man as a man, neither more nor less, and leaves the final judgment where it belongs—with the only One who sees without distortion.

Signed - 

John The-Not-So-Beloved