Framed In - Part Three
A three-part meditation on art, identity, and the sanctity of beholding others
The Final Question
Welcome to Part Three of Framed In: our series on beholding God’s masterpiece. We’ve been looking through three frames of reference that deepen our understanding of God’s desire for humanity and help us rediscover our identity in the hands of the Artist.
In Part One, we examined how God’s artwork—humanity—is often mislabeled, misunderstood, and overlooked. We learned that what we are is in direct relation to the foundation of the imago Dei—God’s image in us—and that this recognition allows us to see others with dignity, value, and the hope of restoration.
In Part Two, we framed who we are. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, we are given the opportunity to become the New Humanity with a restored image and purpose.
Now, in Part Three, we will explore what it would look like to live as a Body of the New Humanity—as a people that behold one another in steadfast love. This third frame serves as a threshold to our Kingdom Imagination and our entrance into experiencing the “already” of the Kingdom, even as we await its fullness.
So we ask: What happens when this restoration overflows in our communities? What does it look like to live the Kingdom life with one another?
Reverse Perspective: When the Kingdom Looks Back
Artists sometimes use a technique called reverse perspective, which flips the usual logic of linear perspective. In linear perspective, objects further away from you appear…well…further away. It’s the natural way your eye processes information, as the lines that you could draw along these objects converge with the horizon, and the vanishing point is off in the distance.
In contrast, objects further away, when painted in reverse perspective, appear larger, and the lines drawn in space diverge at the horizon, rather than converge. This reversal actually makes the viewer in the center of the scene, as the vanishing point is at or behind the viewer themselves. I know this is difficult to mentally visualize, so here is a good video that shows this visually.
In the traditional linear perspective, we take in the scene and subjects of the artwork through our external observation. In reverse perspective, however, in some ways it is the painting that observes us. This is how most Christian iconography is created, because it is seen as an invitation into participation with the ongoing reality of the Kingdom. This metaphor powerfully reframes how we see the Kingdom.
The Kingdom Sees You First
In this third frame, we realize that we are not simply looking into a New Creation, but that the New looks back upon us. We may be standing upon the border-lands of the New, and yet already we are enveloped within its land. The Kingdom in its lively, dynamic, and personal nature is already perceiving, inviting, and transforming those who dare to behold its beauty. This divine attention permeates and redefines our collective being throughout the shared spaces of relationship—the connecting tissue of the Body—where true identity is not found in self-definition, but by God’s sight.
The Kingdom Invites You In
The divergent lines of the third frame pull us into the Kingdom’s life, as participants and not spectators. The King invites all who would submit to His rule and reign to come and live in His land—to farm, garden, create, build, and love as a restored people.
It is an inhabited and cultivated land, and one we have the very opportunity to live in now! The Kingdom is not abstract, but embodied. It is in this that we come to understand Jesus’ words, “the Kingdom is at hand.”
His Kingdom is in process, and brimming with unlimited potential as we take steps forward through death, to life, into who we were meant to be. It is a place of great expectation and delight.
The Kingdom that is Near
The Kingdom of God isn’t just our future hope. It’s here as a present reality.
We may define it as “God’s authority and right to rule” and reign here on earth and “the realm in which [He] exercises His authority.”
The Church—the global community of believers—is its herald and has made it a home.
Where Babel, Egypt, Babylon, or Rome aimed to impose their influence by their will, the Kingdom people pray: “Thy will be done,” and join in the Spirit’s work of building the Garden-City where God’s reign and our lives are one. It’s found in those who are being formed continually more and more into Christ’s character, in their ruling, lamenting, and restoring.
Here, the Garden-City arises out of communion with God and one another—a reality that has been blooming for two millennia across hundreds of generations, the world’s geographies, and every tribe and tongue.
And in this New reality, through the three frames of reference, we see something absolutely stunning.
Echoes of the Trinity
At the very center of this vision lies the Trinity.
God—Father, Son, and Spirit—exists in perfect communion. This mutual love then becomes our model for one another. When we begin to see others with honor, engage them with grace, and live in joyful interdependence, we echo the very rhythm the Trinity has danced in since before time.
And here we stumble into a mysterious and unexpected fourth frame: the Communion Frame.
At our deepest core, we have been made to echo this communion shared between the God-head; that we would both see and be seen in love. That we may be self-giving, curious, and engaged with one another beyond hurry or utility, but in our very uniqueness.
This is just like the imago Dei in the sense that it is another refraction of the Triune God, where the beholding of humanity participates in this divine echo of worth, creativity, and life.
And this final frame is what binds together the other frames, not as a separate perspective, but as the lifeblood of the other three. When we learn to receive God himself—Emmanuel—and His love through the Cross, and when we come to give it—give and receive!—we are set free.
This fourth frame is what makes all of the other frames bidirectional. That an external reality defines an internal (and eventual external) transformation that externalizes itself once again as love.
We are both art and artist, imitating the one true Artist. The Church then is to become a pure and holy cathedral of love—alive with beautiful and unique fruits that spill out into the world.
Through the Communion Frame—the Eucharist—we take of Christ’s body and blood, and are joined to Him. Without this, there is no sacrifice upon the Cross, no resurrection, no Kingdom.
Liturgies of the Frames
In the culture we live in—fractured, hyper-critical, increasingly aggressive and violent, and valued by constant output, we need to have grounded practices in living in the Communion and Kingdom Frames.
Here are a few places to begin:
Memory as Re-Creation in The Beauty Beyond, where we explored how memory fuels Kingdom imagination.
Pentimento and Kainos in To See and See Again, where wilderness and brokenness shape our renewal.
The Prophetic Cycle of Intent, Lament, Restoration, and Reintegration in The Work of Peace in a World of Injustice, which outlines the restorative process for metabolizing injustice, pain, and brokenness that results in transforming shalom.
Micro-practices from each Framed In entry that include rhythms of peace, presence, blessing, and attention.
The classical Spiritual Disciplines of communion, baptism, fasting, and Scripture, which may be simple, but powerful (and often arduous) practices of Kingdom formation.
Perhaps the most important work of our time is to reclaim the divine love as given by God and to give it to the world around us. This is where the Kingdom unfurls itself before us.
For the fracturing: forgiveness, deep listening, relational engagement, and lament.
For the hyper-critical: unrooted bitterness, joy, hesed, and a shared sense of group identity.
For the aggressive and violent: Communion, the memory of Christ, loving service.
For the output-oriented: identity as defined by God and the cultivation of an eternal mindset.
In these, we encounter an ongoing liturgy.
We refuse to speed through life or scroll past eroded human dignity.
We slow down. We see more clearly, cultivating attention and discernment for what is overlooked.
We take in their physicality, their creativity, their joys and sorrows.
We learn about what makes them laugh or cry and honor them for who they are, not necessarily for who they could become.
We listen to the weight of sorrow and the inability to speak or externalize pain.
We hear the conversations and the wind as the poiema around us demands our beholding.
We do not rush beyond what is already broken, but give the gift of being heard and understood.
We resist injustice, sin, violence, and chaos.
We limit reduction and immediate resolution.
We practice patient onlooking.
We learn un-resolution…that people cannot be resolved and our environs and communities move beyond scale.
We attend to the textures and layers of the communities around us—the history and stories and the holiness of unburdening a people by the power of the gospel.
And we bless—offering ourselves and our resources as sacrificial stewards to beauty that has been hidden, waiting to be uncovered.
It is in this and so much more that our frames finally come together, and we find that we’ve become what I call a Gallery of Communion.
Galleries of Communion
When we live in these frames, we become not just individuals transformed, but a whole gallery of communion. A living exhibit of God’s grace and glory, where each one is seen, honored, and welcomed in their uniqueness.
These galleries are environments where we are safe to be seen and fully known, even as we are unfinished in our becoming. As places where we are not hurried or lost in superficial connections or transactional agreements, but where we are engaged in wonder at one another’s uniqueness and the image this uniqueness reflects.
Here, we learn to view each member as a divine expression of Christ’s Body, unique to God’s poetic impulse. In them, we’d speak less, and when we did finally open our mouths, we’d utter more blessings and fewer critiques. Blessing upon hidden beauty that calls it forth from darkness to light; from death to life and the New into the now.
And we’d be worshipful of the only Artist and reverent at his wild creativity and blooming, repeating graciousness to His children.
The Final Frame Reframes All Others
And so we come to the end of Framed In.
Frame One gave us a theological anthropology: that we are masterpieces made in God’s image.
Frame Two showed us the ethic of the New Humanity as co-creators with Christ.
Frame Three unveiled the Kingdom: a living gallery of welcoming attention to the New.
Frame Four, Communion, is the mystery that makes every glimpse of beauty possible in Christ.
The final frame reframes all others, as they refract in upon themselves to a new understanding where we come to know that before we see, we are seen; before we know, we are known, and before we love, we are loved. This is the pure and holy mystery of the gospel—and it’s grand reversal upon our blindness.
May we become people who see as God sees—slowly, truly, tenderly.
And may our churches become living galleries of communion, echoing the love of the Artist who is making all things New.
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P.S. If you appreciate these reflections or others across my site, you’ll find even more in my new book, Descent//Ascent, which has just been released within the last couple of weeks. It’s personal and hopeful, and I think you’ll enjoy it! If you’d like to read it (or purchase a copy for someone who might need it), you can pick one up here. Thank you so much for your support!