Remember, Lizzie Mae, when the family took me off to visit my Mom in Milledgeville? Growing up in Georgia often offered serendipitous surprises in childhood.

She came with us out of the hospital, usually for lunch and an afternoon of chatting. From time to time, we visited a ramshackle restaurant, whose outside brick walls were painted forest green with a big red and white Coca Cola sign painted over the green. The main menu was pork barbeque. Barbeque sandwiches, barbeque platters, barbeque ribs, both half and whole rack. Makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

But the thing I liked most about that eatery was just outside the building where they kept a ramshackle wire cage that was home to a small monkey. I spent hours around that cage, gazing, poking my fingers through the wire. I wished I could take that monkey home and keep it for my own personal pet. Needless to say, this notion did not sit well with the grown-ups. So, much to my eight-year-old chagrin, it never happened. Had it actually occurred, maybe I would enjoy monkeys more today.

Now monkeys are, after all, members of that category of beings identified as "All creatures great and small." They are part of nature and part of God's creation. As such, they are to be valued. Some value them more than others. More, no doubt, than me.

But where are we going with this? What the heck do monkeys have to say about you and me? About God?

If a monkey could talk to humans, what do you suppose he might say?

"You guys are cold!

"Amazingly, even though you can do some of the things we do, there is no way that we are related. You humans are more related to an epileptic hyena than you are to us. You guys are like hyenas because you scavenge. You scavenge off each other.

"How often do you just sit in the trees and groom each other, taking care of each other's needs?

"No, you want it all. You make no distinction between what is rotten and what is good. Or, you get mixed up as to which is which. We would never do that. Monkeys have common sense. We care about one another. We share. We give. You guys don't. At least enough of you don't to make life miserable for the others of your kind.

"So how is it that you humans were created in the Image of God and we weren't?"

Good question -- especially from a monkey. Does the thought ever cross your mind that when you look at yourself in a mirror, that maybe God is looking back at you?

Ok, probably not.

Or, maybe you do look a little like God? After all, you look a little like Jesus, right? You got a head, a torso, two arms, two eyes, nose, mouth? Jesus had all that stuff. I wonder how long Jesus has looked like that? Genesis tells us that God "walked" in the garden of Eden in the cool of the day. Probably had to have two legs to do that. Spirits don't need to "walk." When he appeared to Abraham, he looked like a man. Same for Jacob and others. Remember the guy in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace? Heated seven times hotter than it should have been?

Maybe your physical appearance has rationale behind it.

Maybe that's at least part of what the Scriptures meant when it tells us that you were made in the Image of God. No other creature looks exactly like you. Nobody else has your DNA, has your fingerprint, or eye retina. Nobody has ever confused (jokes aside) a monkey with a human. No other creature looks like Jesus, who probably looked that way in heaven, before he was born in a manger. And if we are to believe the first chapter of Acts, he looks that way now and when he comes again, he will still look that way. "That way," being like you and like me.

Now when you look in the mirror and think, "Hey you know, maybe I do look a little like God." Kind of rattles you a little bit, doesn't it? What does such a thing really mean? At the very least it means you have some potential. At the very least it means that there is a reason you are alive. At the very least it means your birth and life on this earth is no accident, that like Jesus, you arrived at just the right time in human history to do whatever it is that God intended for you -- that could not have been done by anyone else except you.

At the very least it means that you're no monkey and you need to live up to what you look like.

-- PDM

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