I was working on a big video project. I gave a couple people rough edits of their sections of the video. They watched them and gave me feedback. They told me what didn’t work, what they didn’t understand.

It was hard. I don’t like getting a diagnosis.

I want my picture of how things are to be the right one. I want the images that I edit together, the creative vision that I have. When I hand someone a DVD and they say, “the music isn’t right” and “we need more pictures of that” and “why didn’t you use those images” and “the feeling of that part isn’t quite right” and “the volume is all over the place”, I take it personally.

That’s why I haven’t done rough edits very often. I don’t like the critique. But that’s silly. The best video is going to emerge only if I am willing to hear bad news.

You know the feeling. We don’t go to the doctor because we’re afraid that we will be told what we already know to be true, that something’s wrong. We don’t look at our own behavior because we’d rather not acknowledge that we are wrong.

Paul calls us jars of clay. Fragile, durable, functional, cracking jars of clay. We carry treasure, he says, but we are thrown pots. God, Paul says, once said “let there be light.” That same God makes his light shine in our hearts. That light lets us know the glory of God as it  showed up in the face of Jesus.  But this blazing light is in jars of clay.

Here’s the thing: the diagnosis doesn’t create the rough video or the illness or the fragile clay. It does give the information necessary for addressing improvement. It’s not bad news. It’s news.

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Yesterday, I asked you to answer some questions about the Bible. By 5:30pm, more than 30 of you did. And the answers? You are so cool. And honest. I love you. (But truth? I did already). I’ll give the link again for those who didn’t answer. And I’ll talk about your answers next week.  (The Bible survey )