Thank you, Martin and Chris, for your idea and invitation to join this GLOG. Reading that first entry by Martin, I recognized myself as one who is in that sunless valley. In fact, it ‘dawned’ on me today that my journey into that valley essentially began shortly after my CGM group’s year ended. I sustained a back injury a few weeks later which was the beginning of the end to life as I knew it.
Yes, it has been a sunless valley. But I want to shout from it that God is light!
Looking under the sun, my resume does not have much to show for the past several years. Nonetheless, I can say that I would not trade my trials for the world! Not because they haven’t been painful. Oh no, I have been chiselled and scraped and pounded and crushed, but not beaten by my pain and losses. The testing and refining of my faith has forced me time and time again to look above the sun, to the Son.
It is in the deepest and darkest valleys, where this world’s sun can hardly reach, that the Light of the world is best seen.
My love and knowledge of God has increased so much through the worst of times that they have become the best and most treasured of times. While many of my hopes and dreams have evaporated, my hope in the One who does not disappoint has become more firm. That hope gives me impetus to be creative and find expressions for my interests despite my physical limitations. Just one example. Once I stopped waiting to be able to paint again in order to express myself artistically and threw myself into photography, I’ve not looked back. I've had so much fun taking my pocket camera everywhere, ready to capture a moment of common grace or beauty to savor.
And so the journey continues!
Appreciate the honesty, Julie. Also, appreciate the pic which I'm assuming is the result of your not looking back. Press on, sister. Capture the light—whether through pen or paint or pic—and let it shine in the darkness. In many ways this side of heaven will always be a shadowy existence were we see but through a glass darkly. I think it's only when we actually wake up to the light of that bright country that we'll finally realize the depths of the darkness we left behind...but by then it won't matter. Darkness and death will flee at the sound of the Lion of Judah's mighty roar!
ReplyDeleteMartin
P.S. Keep on sharing your photos if you got the time to load them up.