A few weeks ago my wife and I decided to take in a local production here in Pensacola. We had great expectations for what we were going to see and were excited for our evening.
The theater was overcrowded and buzzing with excitement as we arrived. Flowers in hand, I met my wife in the theater after a long day of work. The lights dimmed and the show began.
It was a musical and to be perfectly honest….it was horrific. The actors barely new their lines and stumble through there scene like a heard of apathetic llamas. That is when you could even hear them seeing as how projection seemed to be a completely foreign concept to most of them.
Then can the musical numbers! The singers while holding wonderful potential, fell very short of the professional level needed for a quality production. They were pitchy at best and down right horrific at worst.
And let’s not forget the choreography. You may as well have put trained monkeys on the stage. The dancers were rarely in sync and spent most of the time looking to their choreographer for any clue as to what to do next. Very amateur hour.
In short, it was terrible. It would not last a nanosecond on the streets of broadway. It was the worst production ever…..but I absolutely loved it.
It was my daughter’s fall production at her elementary school. What made the production so amazing was not it’s quality, but it’s cast. I watched my daughter with the love and pride that only a parent could have. Sure, she wasn’t perfect but she has come an awfully long way in a year. And besides that, she is MY CHILD.
Looking back at my critique of the production in light of this revelation makes the blistering review seem distasteful and inappropriate. Of course there we issues in acting, dancing, singing and almost everywhere else…because these were children and not professionals!
But isn’t this how we feel God sees us sometimes. Far too often, we feel like God is a giant Roger Ebert in the sky giving us a thumbs up or down based on our current performance. Most of us feel the need to be perfect in the sight of a perfect God and then beat ourselves up when we don’t live up to our own unrealistic expectations. This causes us to spend the majority of our time on earth trying to “prove” ourselves worthy of the love and grace of God instead of existing in it as he intended.
Now I am not advocating that we just throw in the towel and sin it up. It’s because of the unmerited favor of god that we do not desire to live that way anymore. Sure we will make mistakes..and probably more than we want to, but that does not change God’s opinion of us.
God our Father sees us as we walk through the scenes of the production we call life, like I saw my daughter. He loves us like no one else in the room. No matter our performance..Hhis love remains steady. If we stumble or mess up a scene, he will correct us in that love. And when he sees how far we have come from one season to the next he will be proud of what He sees, as we continue to grow in Him.
