Friday, February 02, 2007


A five star shot from the first and possibly semi-annual 'Triple C' pictorial scavenger hunt...
Light of Dawn

When I wake up in the morning, I’m always really careful and quiet, trying not to make any noise in the pitch dark so as not to wake up the babies, but I almost always wind up making a huge racket anyway! And the worst part is, I do the same exact thing almost every day… I shut off my alarm and creep slowly and silently into the bathroom where I slam my little toe into the corner of this stepping stool Anna uses so that she can reach the sink. After crushing my toe, I usually keel over and knock something loud and ceramic into the sink while I wordlessly agonize over the pain pulsating through my most insignificant appendage. You might think that after almost two years of that little stool sitting right there in front of our bathroom sink, I would remember it in the morning and not injure myself on it, but no, I never remember it... I just can’t see the thing.

Proverbs 4:18-19 says, “The path of righteousness is like the first gleam of dawn, shining even brighter till the full light of day. But the way of wickedness is like deep darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble.” When we are walking outside of what the Lord wants for our life, we are in the dark. I know that in my life, when I have been traveling on the ‘way of wickedness’ I stumble and fall over and over again into the same things… You would think that after a while we would learn where the pitfalls are even if we are in the dark, but we don’t. You see, the way of wickedness never changes. There’s no light, you can’t see where you’re going and so you just keep stumbling over the same things again and again.

The great thing about walking in obedience is that it is dynamic… you are changing and growing. Unlike the darkness where nothing ever changes, righteousness gets easier and easier. I was a freshman in college when I first heard a sermon about this idea. I had always thought (and always heard) that life would ever be the same as it always was… a fight where I mostly lost and wasn’t really fighting. Then I heard that holiness builds on its self and you get better at it as you go along on the path of righteousness. The fight gets harder and more fierce as your life goes along, but the more you walk with Him, the better you get at fighting it.

It’s like the first light of dawn… as you start to walk in righteousness, it’s still mostly dark, but you can see silhouettes of shapes you didn’t know were there. As you avoid those, the light gets a little brighter and you can see colors and shadows. As you keep walking, the day comes on stronger with more and more light. Walking in disobedience never changes… it doesn’t even get harder. It just has you beaten. But walking with the Lord gets both harder and easier as you go along throughout your life… it gets brighter and clearer as you get older and better at walking and fighting.

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