golden clay

Today I wake to a world glowing with the brightness of His radiance. And I wonder if I shine too. I catch myself telling my Saviour that I will do anything in order to love Him more today. I feel a heavenly finger pointing to the darkness in my soul and I groan. Are we willing to make sacrifices to love Him and be used by Him, or do we close our ears to His quiet whispers? Let us open our hearts to His conviction and cause our feet to move to obedience.

The days fade away like the pages of my textbooks. Have I given every one of them to Jesus? The clock is like the globe, always spinning. Will we become disoriented by its speed, or will we stand sure on the Immovable One? Do we often fail to give Him this moment because we failed to give Him the last? Let us leave our failures with the past movements of the hands of the clock, and lift our palms heavenward.

Sometimes the best parts of life come late at night, when the day has drained you right empty. Isn’t the most beautiful way of worship through the joy shaking up our bellies and exploding all over our faces? Take the time to split a smile, and share it around before the sun goes down.

I watched with mouth wide open, there in the lecture hall, as he pulled every perverted strand out of the historical blanket and embellished it in great detail until my mind forgot the meaning of purity. And they did this every day in our textbooks, in the lectures, on the slides. They told us how archaeologists had found a flute that men played seventy thousand years ago. How could we question when they have thick glasses, and speak with big words? We’re finally thinking for ourselves, but only thinking what they let us think. In all this aching, lying world, I cling to truth.

“Let God be true, and every man a liar.” Romans 3:4

The air outside was like frozen tissue paper, and I was stuffed right inside its creases. The screaming wind had buried its sorrows and moved on. Everything was calm as we walked to the bus stop. Isn’t it always like that? The storm comes, and it goes. Today is just a day with its problems and its joys, but it drifts away like the dandelion’s grey hair. We’d do well to remember that all this pain will fade into the shadows of the morning light.

She wasn’t Christian on the way to the Celestial Citizen or anything. She was just hunched over, with a hockey bag on her back. The wind sunk its hungry jaws into our flesh as I passed her on the sidewalk. I slowed.   Why would Jesus want me to go back to help her? I turned and faced the rain.

“You okay with that?”

“Oh yeah. I just have to go to the lights.”

“Still that’s far!”

“Yeah. I’ll be okay.”

Why did I need to turn? I didn’t share the gospel or anything. The rain spat its fury in my face. It is not for me to question why, but to obey and trust. Could not Jesus lift the burden without one word from my lips?

I’m surrounded by faces looking out windows, looking at screens, looking at the floor. We’re bumping through neighborhoods to bus stops. Can I find one joy-lit countenance among them, one pair of shining, sparkling eyes? How much of faith is written on the face? The emptiness is in theirs. May His joy illuminate mine.

When Sunday fades into the darkness, bits of hurricane banging their fury on the pavement outside, I wonder what to cling to now. When this week holds exams, essays, and exhaustion, what do I get to hold? And, it echoes louder than the storm outside: the answer inside my soul. The cross, bloodied, washes away anxiety as dirty footprints become water colors on the wet sidewalks.