The Day of Enlargement
by Jim Banks
I am not an artist by any means, but I have been working on a small something that I hope to get done by Christmas. I finished the original, sort of, and then I wondered what it would look like bigger, so I took it to Kinkos to enlarge it 150%. It was interesting.
I learned that when you enlarge something, all the small imperfections become very noticeable. Gaps, lines that don't quite meet, segments that are not dark enough, or perhaps too dark, overall balance/imbalance of parts, become glaringly obvious. When small, you don't even see the imperfections. When large, and larger, they all start to show up.
I then imagined that this must be what Judgment is like for us humans as we stand before God. I think we tend to look at judgment as God poring over our lives with a gigantic magnifying glass, trying to find anything wrong that He possibly can. But I now think it is probably the opposite. Perhaps in the Day Of Enlargement God simply makes us bigger, big enough so that all that doesn't line up becomes clear and beyond dispute. From this perspective judgment isn't something that God does to us, but is instead a manifestation of who we really are.
For Christians, on that Day we will long for the Artist to set us fully right, to complete the re-drawing begun in this life. For Non-Christians, the enlargement may be simply unbearable, an eternal torment. Maybe we were destined to be enlarged throughout eternity, and for Christians that would be eternal joy, while for Non-Christians that enlargement would be eternal and increasing torment.
May God grant that we all find the Artist's touch and the Day Of Enlargement a Day we long for, a homecoming, and not a time of dread.
Last updated: 22 September 1998. Copyright 1998 Jim Banks <JWBank@aol.com>, Arvada, CO. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the copyright holder.