My husband and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary this week, and we went to our favorite place: Cannon Beach, Oregon. Our first date was there, and we also spent our honeymoon in the small coastal town along the picturesque Oregon shore. This year we spent our anniversary enjoying the beautiful beach with our three children. The weather was mostly good, but being the Oregon Coast, it varied from day to day. From sunny and warm, to sunny but windy, to overcast and fog; we had it all, including a bit of misty rain one morning, but we had a great time, and I took lots of pictures as usual.
I transferred the photos to our computer when we got home. Some of them were taken with blue skies, while others were mostly gray. Gray sky, gray water, gray sand. I was tempted to discard those, but one of them caught my artistic eye, and I could see it had the potential to be much more. With some creative photo editing, the gray clouds and gray water could become a hazy purple or blue, like when the morning light first illuminates the sky. Or it could glow with the colors of a muted sunset that gives a pink or orange hue to the skyline.
You can see the results, and I think the way we look at life, circumstances, others, and ourselves can also be viewed through different filters. It may be a bleak picture with the unaided eye, but as children of light, we can have a different view. In Luke 11:34, Jesus says that the eye is the lamp of the body. When our eyes are good, the whole body will be filled with light, but when our eyes are bad, darkness prevails. Gloom. Despair. Hopelessness. The outlook is bleak and gray, like an overcast sky, but that's just a limited human view. God's got Photoshop!
When I am feeling discouraged, afraid, hopeless, unloved, insignificant, or some other emotion based on difficult circumstances, I ask God to give me a different view. To filter things through the light of His love. His truth. His ways. His beauty. His goodness. Seeing the light fills me with light. Hope. Joy. Peace. Patience. May we live as children of light, for our Father is glorious--even on a cloudy day.
