Sept 23 : Light Shining in Darkness
“Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat. We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered. Bring them here to me,” he said. (Matthew 14:16-18)
Balance always seems to be key…give what you can and God will meet your needs. Do everything in love.
Happy Birthday to my mom, Carol ❤️ (her first bday in heaven) and my sister-in-law, Cyndi ❤️.
CREATE A CALM MAP
Select a photo that represents calm or stillness for you, and map out your calm practice. What kinds of environments and strategies help you cultivate a feeling of calm?
RECOMMENDED MATERIALS
Your journal, pens, pencils, markers, a camera and photo printer, or scissors for cutting out an image, old magazines, watercolors, and double-sided tape or glue.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. To begin our creative exercise for cultivating calm, stillness and letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle, find a picture (online, in your own photo albums or in a magazine) that represents calm or stillness for you. Print out that picture or cut out the image you found. Then, turn to a blank set of facing pages in your journal and tape your picture onto one side. You can also watercolor around your image or decorate your page any way you like.
2. In the margins around your image, answer the following question: What about your picture makes you think of calm and stillness? For example, your reason might be water, quiet and being outside. Determine the words that represent calm and stillness to you, and write them around your image.
(steps 3,4,5 tomorrow)~~~~~
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:5
I know almost all photos today are taken digitally, but when I was growing up, Polaroid pictures were all the rage. You could snap a photo and see it in a couple of minutes. It was wild. The thing about Polaroid pictures is that it needed light to develop and it took a little while for this to happen. People ended up shaking the pictures in their hands in the hopes it would develop a little faster. It didn’t work with the Polaroid images, and it doesn’t work with people either.
If you’re going through a hard time or making some bad choices, you don’t need to stay cooped and up in the darkness. What you need is light to help a better picture come into view. Give yourself a little grace too. The image of who you are becoming isn’t going to instantaneously emerge. It’s going to take a little time. We don’t need to shake people up while we’re waiting either. It doesn’t speed things up by even a second.
It’s tempting to keep things hidden. Think about a time when a friend came to you and said they needed help. Did you scoff in their face and walk away? Of course not. You had sympathy and expressed empathy for them. You loved them, you asked how you could help. Sadly, we don’t often extend the same grace to ourselves. Instead, we listen to lies we tell ourselves about how we’ll just be a bother if we tell a friend we’re having problems. We tell ourselves we don’t deserve their presence. We think God is disappointed in us. Don’t fall for this.
If you think God might love you more when you act like you have it together, you’re believing a lie. God sees you at your worst, and he’s nuts about you. God knows life happens to us and it can leave scars on our hearts. He wants us to be patient with ourselves and the people around us. What he’s creating in us is going to take a little time and a whole lot of light to develop.
What dark parts of your life does God want to shine in?
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