We Shall be Like Him

Walking down the canal last week, I stopped and admired a family of mute swans swimming by. There were two adults and three full-grown cygnets. Unfortunately, they mistook this stationary observer as a source of bread, and came close to the path, expectantly. Their disappointment didn’t last, for they found some underwater weed which they noisily gobbled, affording me better opportunities to photograph. The cygnets, though large, were still that dreary grey colour, betraying their immaturity. Their parents were the beautiful white with which we associate the species.

It doesn’t take Danny Kaye or Harry Secombe crooning The Ugly Duckling to remind us that the grey feathers of youth will become the brilliant white of maturity. So with the Christian. Though our natures have been changed, we continue to appear drab and temporal. Our spiritual DNA has been altered from that of Adam the First to Adam the Last, yet our glorious new identities are not fully realised. We slip-up, we ache, we doubt, we sin, we die. Yet beneath those dreary grey feathers is a pure brilliance waiting to be revealed:

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. 1 John 3:2-3