"Come Into the Light"

This picture came a few months after we moved last year up to my husband's folks' farm. It was in the fall, and I was in the middle of a Beth Moore study on the life of Esther. I had signed up for the study to meet some people and get some needed structure to my personal study. Didn't expect to be BLOWN AWAY by it.

One of the themes of the study is destiny. I know. It's heady and elusive -- I hadn't ever spent much time dwelling on it, but the study forced the issue, and my personal circumstances were perfectly arranged for each week's teaching to reach me at my core. Because of the circumstances that prompted our move, I was in a place of not wanting to deal with big picture stuff like destiny because I was confused and hurt. But at the same time I was drawn to it, and there remained in me a flicker of hope that I'd yet be able to fulfill what God created me to do.

It was into this mental/spiritual/emotional context that this picture came. Here's some thoughts that came:

"Destinies are fulfilled in the light. I am with you where you are. I won't leave you, but in this dim place you won't fulfill your destiny. Come fully into the light. That is where I am. That is where you'll be able to see Me -- to see as I've created you to see."

God, help me to want the life you made me for more than this familiar place where I only see you faintly and where I sit in habitual sin and contentment with mediocrity.
November 2009

Ugh. I dislike what this picture reveals. Feeling those pointed words takes me to a place of sadness and hope all at once. If I'm partly in the shadows and partly in the light, it reveals where my thoughts rest and what I believe. Because what I believe, I do.

This thing about destinies hasn't ever been something I've explored. Just seemed a little out there. But really -- what's the big picture purpose of life? We each have unique expressions of the same thing: love God and love people. A life poured out in that pursuit is a life well lived.

The shadows symbolize sin; the sinful nature; the flesh, however you want to put it. My new favorite phrase for that is thanks to author Bill Giovanetti: the "inner mess." The light, of course, symbolizes the presence of God. Living in the light means living close to God.

Responding

What do you do with this picture? Where do you see yourself? Where are you saying yes to God? Where are you saying no? What do your habits reveal about your love for God and others? Your daily schedule?

I'm so not about legalism. I want to learn how to love. But loving means living in truth. And where there's stuff in my life that bears evidence of deception (you know, the thing about "being hardened by sin's deceitfulness"), I want to see the deception for what it is and trade it for truth.

But it's messy and I'm inconsistent. Sometimes I care more than other times. Sometimes I can be so engaged and other times so checked out. Thank God that he knows how to father us toward maturity. God, will you increase my faith and put within me a greater desire for yourself.