A Small Glimpse of God's Brilliance

I was driving in my car yesterday as the sun was beginning to go down. I looked over into the horizon and the sky was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The top of sky was bright blue with clouds below it and the pinkish, purplish colors of the sun going down were underneath the clouds. What was so incredible was the way the light was shining from behind the clouds. I have seen light shining from behind clouds before, but never quite like this. It seemed to just radiate incredible, brilliant beams of light all around it and you could see the brilliance and brightest of the sun peaking through little holes in the clouds.

I felt like Moses on the mountain getting just a glimpse of God. You could tell the light was so powerful and bright you could never look directly at it, but the brilliance the light had even when it was totally covered by the clouds was the most marvelous thing I have ever seen.

How much more marvelous and beautiful is it going to be when we, like Moses, actually get to see God face to face!! You know, I think we often wonder how we could be satisfied to just gaze upon God for eternity. I can tell you after yesterday, I can’t wait!! I know what I saw was only a very tiny glimpse of God’s brilliance. I can’t wait to be completely surrounded by the complete brilliance of God!

Remodeling....

Well, we began the remodeling process on one of our bathrooms about 3 weeks ago now. We've gotten most of the floor ripped up and the wall paper off the walls. And now it's been sitting like that for about 3 weeks while we try and find time to finish it. It was one of those projects you get started on and then realize you're going to need to do a little more than what you thought you would when you first started. Then life got in the way, and we haven't had a free weekend since then to finish it. And with everything on the calendar for this month, it looks like it's going to be the first of March before another "somewhat free" weekend shows up.

As I look at the bare, scrapped walls of my bathroom, it makes me think about what we do when we begin to "remodel" our lives. We jump in whole heartedly to start scraping off all of the ugliness and outdatedness, then once we are left with bare walls, it causes us to realize there is a lot more to it, that just scrapping away all of the old "stuff".

If we are going to remodel our lives, we have to scrape away all the old stuff; we have to get down to the bare walls, the cracks that need to fixed, and anything else that is covering up what we need to change in our lives. In order for God to remodel us, we need to really examine what's left when we get down to the bare walls. Just like we have to examine those bare walls in the bathroom, before we can decide what it's going to take to make it look right again.

Once you do that, you can begin the process of making things look new again. You can redo the walls, the floor, the shower cutains, etc. And when you are finished everything will look fresh and bright and renewed.

Will my bathroom ever get completely finished? Yes, at least until we decide it's time to remodel again. Are our lives ever completely remodeled? Not really. Our lives are one place in which remodeling is never really finished. I believe we should always be at the stage of continual remodeling in our lives. We need to be continuing to remodel our lives to reflect the life of Jesus and be worthy to be one who is called a child of God. We should constantly be changing and mirroring the image of Jesus in every aspect of our lives.

Only when we meet Jesus will our remodeling be completely finished. When we meet Christ and He makes us completely New!! Jesus is the potter and we are the clay. He is continaully reshaping us and remodeling us to look more and more like Him. We just have to give Him the freedom to remodel us and not resist His reshaping of our lives.

Once my bathroom is finished, it won't always stay looking as clean and new as things do when they are first finished. But if we allow Jesus to continually reshape and remodel us, our lives will begin to look like Christ, the perfect template for all of us to remodeling our lives after.

Praise God for the perfect son and template he gave us to use as we daily remodel our lives.

The Key to Your Heart

I want to thank all of you for your love and encouragement after my first entry. It really means a lot to me! I also want to say that anything you ever read that is good or possibly insightful, comes directly from God! I have never been a writer, except for the occasional letter to my Grandmother when I was much younger when she lived out of town. So I give God all the Glory & Praise!

Having said that, it's really funny the avenues in which God uses to speak to us. I was driving down the highway this afternoon on my way to Sam's (to take back some 4 day old fruit gone really bad!!) when I passed a truck with a strange load in the back. It was piled up to just over the truck bed with what looked like some type of coat racks. As I studied it, something at one end the coat racks, (or whatever they were), jumped out at me. It looked like some type of key hole.

I know it sounds odd that a key hole would jump out at me. But it was like one of those deja vu moments that you sometimes have. It reminded me of something I dreamt last night. When I got up this morning, I didn't even remember dreaming, but what I saw in the back of that truck reminded me of just one split second of my apparent dream. I remembered walking in a big hurry on my way "to something", and bumping into someone. I don't remember a face, I just remember seeing them holding a very large key. Large, like about 2 foot large!! I bumped into them, looked at them awkwardly and puzzled, and walked on. That is all I remember.

But as I remembered that, my head was suddenly filled with the thought, God is trying to unlock something in my heart. As I thought about that for a moment, I realized that sometime over the last 6 months to a year, I started to slowly lock God out of places in my heart. I began to slowly lose pieces of my heart and myself as I sat back and watched some things happen within different aspects of my spiritual journey. I think that's why things of late have hit me so hard. God has been trying to get me to give those parts of my heart back to him, but I continued to keep those parts locked up away from Him. I had become comfortable with only giving God a part of my heart. And by doing that, I let myself be blinded to things I would normally not have just accepted as being ok.

A very wise woman of God (and very good friend!!) once told me that God does not call us to be comfortable, He calls us to be obedient. If we are locking away parts of our heart and keeping them away from God, we can't be truly obedient.

As I traveled on to Sam's, (listening to Free Indeed), their remake of the Dennis Jernigan song "When the Night is Falling" came on. As I listened to the words, these words stood out to me...

"When the night would hide my way, I will listen until I hear you say, How I love you, Child I love you."

While I listened to those words, my emotions got the best of me. I realized that the night (Satan) had been hiding my way. And I realized that if I just listen, I will hear God say, "How I love you, Child I love you". I felt the love of God at that moment like never before and I felt a peace I had not known for quiet some time.

I'm sure there are still places in my heart that I have locked and hidden away from God. But I want to turn the key over to Him and allow Him to unlock those places so that I can once again worship Him with my whole heart, mind and body. I want to let God "Come and Sing Over Me"! My prayer is that you will let God "Come and Sing Over You" as well!