Looking Like Mom

I can't count how many times I have heard the sentence, "You look so much like your mother!"

I'll admit, it isn't one which has ever seemed to bring me any great pleasure.  I guess most young women growing up have many looks they try to avoid and looking like "Mom" would probably be on the top of that list.

I always thought when I was younger I looked like my Daddy.  My dark eyes and dark hair matched his.  My mother's eyes were green and her hair, well over time her hair had been every color except dark.  Naturally it was a darker blonde, but there are pictures of her with red hair, very blonde hair and then in the later years of her life beautiful, sparkly snow white hair. 

I once turned the page in our family photo album and briefly wondered about the picture of myself I found there, until I realized it was a picture of my mother from many years ago.  Regardless of hair color, I can not escape the fact that I walk and talk and move like my mother.  Her genes are indelibly stamped upon my own.

In the last year or so, even my own dark locks have gradually turned lighter (with a little help) and now I am about the same color blonde my mother was at the age I am now. I am becoming more to look like my mother.  I seemed to be changing more and more into her likeness.

This happens to us spiritually as Christians, too.  As we walk with the Lord, follow His word and choose by faith to obey the leading of His Spirit dwelling within us, "we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." (2 Corinthians 3:18.)

The Scriptures tell us we are "conformed to the image of His Son."  We are changed into the same image as the Lord Jesus.  That is the purpose of all our trials, all our difficult and trying places, to remove all that does not conform to His image.

So the next time we find ourselves in a place of hardship, a place of apparent loneliness, a place of tears, let us remember the incredible work the Holy Spirit is performing in and through us in that place. . .the work of changing us "into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."