I saw this on Facebook and it spoke to me in stereo. If you’ve ever wondered why God allows us to go through brokenness, it’s so that maybe we can learn how to shine:

“I was in Dollar Tree last night, and there was a lady and two kids behind me in the LONG line. One was a big kid, and the other one was a toddler. The bigger one had a pack of glow sticks, and the toddler was screaming for them. The Mom opened the pack and gave him one which stopped his tears. He walked around with it smiling; but then the bigger boy took it, and the toddler started screaming again. Just as the Mom was about to fuss, the older child bent the glow stick and handed it back to the toddler. As we walked outside at the same time, the toddler noticed that the stick was now glowing; and his brother said, ‘I had to break it so that you could get the full effect from it.’

I almost ran, because l could hear God saying to me, ‘I had to break you to show you why I created you. You had to go through it so you could fulfill your purpose.’

That precious child was happy just swinging that ‘unbroken’ glow stick around in the air, because he didn’t understand what it was created to do – which was ‘glow’.

There are some people who will be content just ‘being,’ but some of us are chosen… we have to be ‘broken.’

We have to get sick.

We have to lose a job.

We go through a divorce.

We have to bury our spouse, parents, best friend, or our child…

In those moments of desperation, We were broken. But… when the breaking is done, then we will be able to see the reason for which we were created. So when you see us glowing, just know that we have been broken” (stolen from a post on Facebook).

I have a cousin who reads through Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol around this time every year. The part I love is that the copy that she reads once belonged to her dad, my uncle, who passed away in 2006. She writes down the date she finishes each time.

I just might start doing that for myself.

I found a first edition facsimile that gave me all the feels. Plus, it was only $12.99 (which if you haven’t been following the price of books lately is pretty dang cheap).

I’ve read through A Christmas Carol before, but hopefully I can be more consistent from here on out. So in honor of my cousin and in memory of my uncle, I pledge to read through this book once a year until I croak or until Jesus comes back.

And you can hold me to it.

“Why should I spend an hour in prayer when I do nothing during that time but think about people I am angry with, people who are angry with me, books I should read, and books I should write, and thousands of other silly things that happen to grab my mind for a moment?

The answer is: because God is greater than my mind and my heart and what is really happening in the house of prayer is not measurable in terms of human success and failure.

What I must do first of all is to be faithful. If I believe that the first commandment is to love God with my whole heart, mind, and soul, then I should at least be able to spend one hour a day with nobody else but God. The question as to whether it is helpful, useful, practical, or fruitful is completely irrelevant, since the only reason to love is love itself. Everything else is secondary.

The remarkable thing, however, is that sitting in the presence of God for one hour each morning—day after day, week after week, month after month—in total confusion and with myriad distractions radically changes my life. God, who loves me so much that he sent his only son not to condemn me but to save me, does not leave me waiting in the dark too long. I might think that each hour is useless, but after thirty or sixty or ninety such useless hours, I gradually realize that I was not as alone as I thought; a very small, gentle voice has been speaking to me far beyond my noisy place.

So, be confident and trust in the Lord” (Henri Nouwen).

Prayer is not a last resort (or it shouldn’t be), but the first place I go in times of trouble. It should be the first place I go in times of plenty, in want, in anxiety, in peace. Prayer should become as natural to me as breathing.

Thankfully, God’s not waiting on me to become an expert in prayer before He hears me. He’s not waiting until I become proficient at it before I can come boldly before the throne of grace. Even when all I’ve got are sighs and groans and nothing else, He still hears the unspoken words and unexpressed longings.

I don’t have to be any good at praying. I just need to pray. Or better yet, I get to pray.

I’ve been guilty of thinking that where I am is where I will always be. I’ve been guilty of forgetting my past and my future and living in a state of perpetual now where all I can see is right in front of me.

If you forget the past and the future, you lose the big picture. You lose the Meta-narrative of what God is doing. You forget that you are not the point of the story — God is. You are not the main character — Jesus is. You also forget that God has a way of turning peoples’ lives around, usually when they least expected it.

Your job is to be obedient to what you already know. You need to do what God has already spoken and what you already know He requires of you. You need to be actively listening to God’s voice, seeking where He is already working, and preparing yourself to be ready when He calls.

But also you need to trust that in God’s grand scheme, where you are right now is not the end of your story. There’s more to come, and it will be more than worth the wait.

I stole . . . I mean borrowed this from a friend’s social media post and thought it would fit nicely on here;

Good Morning Lord

“A Place for the Weary

Hebrews 10:35
‘Do not lose the courage you had in the past, which has a great reward.’

Is there anything more frail than a bruised reed? Look at the bruised reed at the water’s edge. A once slender and tall stalk of sturdy river grass, it is now bowed and bent.

Are you a bruised reed? Was it so long ago that you stood so tall, so proud? . . .

Then something happened. You were bruised . . .

• by harsh words….
• by a friend’s anger…
• by a spouse’s betrayal. . . .
• By a recent trauma…

The bruised reed. . . . Society knows what to do with you. . . . The world will break you off; the world will snuff you out.

But the artists of Scripture proclaim that God won’t. Painted on canvas after canvas is the tender touch of a Creator who has a special place for the bruised and weary of the world. A God who is friend of the wounded heart.”

This is the only acceptable use of instant coffee in a sentence.

As I write these words, I’m laying in bed in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. The plan is to visit the Biltmore Estates in the morning. To put it mildly, it’s been a little while.

To be more accurate, it’s been over 25 years. I think the last time I was here was back in the ye old collegiate days in the 90s (or as Gen Zers would call it, the late 1900s).

I’m excited. I’m hoping to trigger some long dormant memories by this little trip down memory lane. Also, I hope to make some new ones.

I guess sometimes you can go back.

“Do not worry! Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause anxiety. The heart which clings to goods receives with them the choking burden of worry. Worry collects treasures, and treasures produce more worries. We desire to secure our lives with earthly goods; we want our worrying to make us worry-free, but the truth is the opposite. The chains which bind us to earthly goods, the clutches which hold the goods tight, are themselves worries. Abuse of earthly goods consists of using them as a security for the next day. Worry is always directed toward tomorrow. But the goods are intended only for today in the strictest sense. It is our securing things for tomorrow which makes us so insecure today. It is enough that each day should have its own troubles. Only those who put tomorrow completely into God’s hand and receive fully today what they need for their lives are really secure. Receiving daily liberates me from tomorrow.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

I remember the account of the Israelites in the desert and how God provided manna for them. The trick — if you want to call it that — was that they could only gather enough for that particular day. They couldn’t stockpile it to last for weeks. They had to gather what they needed for the next 24 hours and trust God to provide again the next day.

Worry at its core says that God can’t be trusted, that I can’t take Him at His word. Worry says that if it’s to be, it is up to me. But faith says that if it is to be, God is up to it.

When God’s people tried to take more than what they needed, the surplus went bad and stank. Only when they were faithful did the manna last. When we take God at His word, we never go wrong.

It seems that Jesus had manna in mind when He told us to pray for our daily bread, trusting God for each day rather than trying to figure out the next week or month or year. We pray the same prayer, trusting the same God who keeps His same promises from one day to the next.

I heard once that the average person will hear the gospel seven times before they give their lives to Christ. At first, that might seem disheartening if you aren’t that fortunate seventh person. But remember that you are planting a seed. Regardless of what outwardly transpires, God’s word does not return void. When we are faithful to have gospel conversations, a tiny seed is planted. Always.

When you pray for a person’s salvation, it may seem pointless. You pray day after day and absolutely nothing seems to change. You can tell no difference. But that tiny seed has been planted.

Just as you can’t dig up the earth to see an actual seed growing without destroying the seed, so you can’t force that proverbial seed of faith to germinate. You have to trust the process. You have to trust God’s process. You have to trust that it’s not up to you to save anyone. Only God can do that.

You just have to be faithful to do your part. God will take care of the rest.

I’m just gonna put this out there and leave it for you to decide if it’s spot on or not:

“Vocation is not evoked by your bundle of need and desire. Vocation is what God wants from you whereby your life is transformed into a consequence of God’s redemption of the world. Look no further than Jesus’s disciples – remarkably mediocre, untalented, lackluster yokels – to see that innate talent or inner yearning has less to do with vocation than God’s thing for redeeming lives by assigning us something to do for God” (William H. Willomon).