I Am Made in His Image

by Nayo Hill

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–27)

I recently worked through Psalm 119 using the expositional devotional His Testimonies, My Heritage edited by Kristie Anyabwile. This devotional collects voices of women of color illuminating the Scripture in a way that deeply touched my spirit. There was something meaningful for me to behold this book of reflective writings from women with whom I share an ethnic ancestry in addition to a spiritual heritage. I felt a deep resonance the first time I read the words on the dedication page from Michelle Higgins: “For colored girls who considered giving up when being made in the image of God didn’t seem to be enough.” The tension of being known by God while simultaneously overlooked by the world feels very true to my own story.  As the psalmist speaks of clinging tightly to what the Lord has commanded in the face of adversaries and afflictions, he reminds the reader of the goodness of the Lord and calls her to delight in his laws and precepts. 

The raw expression of both joy and lament found throughout the book of Psalms reflects the reality of human life filled with victories and setbacks, triumphs and disappointments. My life is no exception to this landscape of hills and valleys. Now that I have come to the end of my eight-year graduate school journey, I have been able to take a step back and reflect on what God has been weaving together through the successes and sorrows of my season in Chicago. A central component of these reflections has been wrestling with who God made me to be and how that interacts with the spaces he has invited me to inhabit.

David writes of being known by God in Psalm 139 and says in verse 14, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” This passage that I memorized in childhood encourages me to praise God because he created me fearfully and wonderfully as an African American woman. Within my home growing up, I saw my hair styles and melanated skin mirrored in family members and in the images on the pages of my favorite fiction and Bible story picture books; I now know that my parents intentionally curated our book collection for this purpose. Considering myself as wonderfully made in the image of God made sense in the context of the affirmation and positive reinforcement I received at home. But outside of my home, I was getting a very different message. As an African American child growing up attending predominantly white schools, I came to an awareness pretty early on that my skin color and hair texture were different from the other kids at school. I can still recall an early instance of society telling me I did not belong when one of my sisters and I attended a makeup testing party as preteens. While all of the other party attendees were testing out products that blended well with their complexions, I was crestfallen to discover that there were no options that matched my sister or my skin tones. I thought,  “Am I not meant to be here?”

Experiences such as these in the predominantly white spaces where I grew up resulted in my internalization from a young age that being Black was a liability. From early childhood, my approach to fitting in was to figure out what is desired and be the best at it.  This meant meeting or surpassing the explicit and implicit academic expectations placed upon me by my parents and teachers at my D.C. metropolitan area Blue-Ribbon high school. In adulthood, I have become aware of the lengths my parents went to advocate on my behalf for appropriate treatment and rigorous educational opportunities within the private and public schools I attended. Without their tireless efforts behind the scenes, my teachers’ persistent underestimation of my capacity as a student would have gone unchallenged. When you regularly experience teachers assuming you are less capable of handling the work than your peers and surprised when you prove them wrong, you start to wonder why.

I spent a good chunk of my formative years trying to show people my intellectual capabilities, the valued trait, while minimizing the natural manifestations of being Black, the seemingly unwanted trait. I learned what was valued by society and became the best performer of it. I was quick to emphasize my love for math and science. I developed competence with a high-powered hair dryer and flat iron to make my hair conform to that of my peers. While I knew from an early age that I am made in the image of God, no additions or subtractions, when that truth is in conflict with my lived experience of being regarded differently than my white peers, it is hard to embrace as actually true. Instead, I ended up trying to change myself to fit into the image of what society seemed to want. I now realize that in elevating one part of me while constraining another part, I was actually rejecting a piece of who God made me to be as his image bearer.

My sophomore year of college I attended a large missions conference, where Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil painted a picture of the compassion that Jesus extended to the Samaritan woman at the well who was ethnically different from him AND made in the image of God. As Dr. Salter McNeil talked of the divine appointment that Jesus had with the Samaritan woman, choosing to travel through a region most people of his ethnicity would avoid (John 4:4), I was convicted. In that moment, I realized that the compassion Jesus had extended to this woman was compassion I had been withholding from myself. While I am still working out how to follow Jesus in full as an African American woman, I know for certain that Jesus is not asking me to minimize or downplay my ethnic identity in order to win his approval or the approval of those around me.

God in his graciousness has continued to direct me towards a deeper understanding of what it means to be made in his image. This past year was another inflection point on this journey. I entered 2020 with great expectations for the year to come, one that was (hopefully) my last year of graduate school and also likely filled with several transitions. Like so many others, I could not have imagined how the year would unfold. In the midst of chaos, God offered me opportunities to engage in further reflection on being an African American woman in the Church and in the University. God existed in community from the beginning. This is evident from Genesis 1:26 when God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” As image bearers, I believe we, too, are called to be in community with other believers. The greatest blessing of my 2020 was developing a consistent prayer life with other HTC members. The 6:30 a.m. crew was a gift of stability in the midst of several very unstable months. In meeting regularly, we were living out a part of what it means to be created in God’s image. Our prayer calls helped align my focus in the right place first thing in the morning and brought me great joy to start the day even as we lifted up weighty prayers and petitions to the Lord. We prayed over our city as we watched Chicago groan under the weight of lives lost to gun violence and COVID-19. We prayed with troubled hearts as we witnessed peaceful protesting for justice clash with vandalism and property destruction, sending our city into a different form of lockdown. A blinding spotlight began to shine on the daily struggle of how it feels to be Black in America. Everyone was forced to reckon with this reality in some form or another. As conversations about racism ignited a flurry of social media posts, sympathy emails, and statements declaring renewed commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, my own awareness of how different my experience of the world is from those in the places I typically inhabit steadily increased. Through shock and disbelief, I continued to pray for understanding and healing in the church, our city, and our country. I processed through several emotions at the beginning of last summer—anger, grief, confusion, sadness—but honestly, after a few weeks of engaging in dialogue and praying with a heavy heart, the strongest feeling I had was exhaustion. I reflected in my journal:

I am exhausted.

Exhausted from a week of talking and processing; crying and reflecting

Exhausted from years of sitting in classrooms where I was clearly not the intended audience

Exhausted from a lifetime of attempting to amplify the parts of me that are desired professionally so that I will not be overlooked because of the color of my skin

Exhausted from living in fragments where I am seen for the diversity quotas but unseen for all of who I am

Journal excerpt from June 9, 2020

Although 2020 brought a new layer of exhaustion for me regarding the reality of being a Black person in this country, the challenges that were exposed more potently last year are not new. The society in which we live today is built upon a framework that distorted the truth of what it meant to be a human being and ultimately what it meant to be made in the image of God. As I have continued in my pursuit of higher education in engineering and physical therapy, I have experienced firsthand that there is still a lot of work to be done in creating equitable classrooms and culturally competent clinical practitioners. As the conversations around race and ethnicity in the classroom and clinic have evolved, I have found few faculty members and instructors working to integrate cultural awareness into their instruction practices and several who are resistant or outright hostile to the cries for change. There remains a long way to go before students from all cultural backgrounds experience a sense of ownership in the academic environment of science, engineering, and medicine, and I find it frustrating to face the fact that if forward progress is to continue, it is often people like me who are expected to drive that change. These initiatives take time and effort, are often uncompensated, and create additional burdens on people of color who are already navigating the complex landscape of being excellent at what they do while also being one of very few people of color in their department. If it is true that the human race includes people with skin tones and hair textures across the whole spectrum of possibilities AND it is true that all humans are made in the image of God, then it must be true that the collective expression of observable differences also reflects God’s likeness. 

The completion of my graduate studies is leading me on the path that so many other Holy Trinity members have taken before me—away from Chicago. As I step forward into a new city, I carry with me questions that this last season of my life has unearthed: What are the next growth steps  to being the distinct individual that God made me? Is it possible to hold together the pursuit of a career in the ivory tower of the academy and a desire to use my skill sets to engage with under-resourced communities and address racial disparities in health outcomes in our country and abroad? What would it look like for the contemporary church to live out the intentionality and practicality modeled by the early church leaders in addressing the needs of those on the margins (Acts 6:1–7)? Will I be able to find a church community that holds together compassion and truth-telling as profoundly as Jesus does?

Though several questions remain, I will also carry with me an understanding of what it means to be made in God’s image. My discovery of authors and speakers such as Trillia Newbell, Dr. Christina Edmondson, and Jackie Hill Perry—women who demonstrate what it can look like to embrace Black identity as a Christian seeking to live out the truth of the gospel—has fostered my own embrace of my identity as an image bearer. As we continue to grapple with the depths of division and brokenness within our society, the truth remains: we are ALL made in God’s image.

Nayo Hill has been a member at Holy Trinity Church Downtown since 2014. She recently earned her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. During her time in Chicago, she enjoyed teaching in the Kid City Green Line, studying at coffee shops in different neighborhoods, and running along the lakefront.