Dimmed By Your Own Imperfections…

Your light force is the life you have inside you. When your life is functioning effortlessly; when your life is unencumbered; when your life is more about accepting rather than grasping, your light shines bright. On those sunny days where you walk about absorbed in the moment with no anxious concern for what happened yesterday or might happen tomorrow, your light is shining brightly. When you’ve finally let go of the concept that your life is all about you and what you do and decide to let it be about Him and what He did, does and will do instead, your light will become so bright it will serve as a beacon to others. People will want to come and stand in your light. Friends will seek to bask in your light. God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. When you shine brightly, you shine God’s light to the world. Your light invites people to find Him. Thus naturally, this kind of thing cannot be tolerated in the systems of the world. Next you are going to start finding people getting healed in heart and body. Light will begin to prevail in a dark and crooked world. In order to counter this potential, the world chips away at you day by day. A poor result here. A loss over there. Relationship struggles. An apparent loss of stability. All these things work together to dim your shine. To wipe that smile off your face. To take away your peace and replace it with agitation, disturbance, trouble. As your shine dims, your enthusiasm for life wanes with it. It takes a few more steps to get there now. Maybe you have been dimmed by your own imperfections.

The real you inside of you is always shining. It’s not the kind of thing you have to improve upon or stoke up any brighter. The problem is there is another you constantly counteracting the desires of the real you. The contrary one you got from the factory. The propensity towards negativity and fear and darkness was preinstalled into your hard drive. They call him the “old man.” He never quite could get it done on his own, though he damn sure tried. This contradiction to your soul is responsible for dimming your shine, by any means necessary. The easiest and quickest path is to turn your focus towards your flesh. Remember I said, you came from the factory flawed. Well now that you belong to God, shining, sometimes you forget to keep looking at Him and His perfection, turning back to yourself and your own imperfections. And it sucks. Can you imagine studying a corrupted nature and expecting to find something that wasn’t corrupted? When you focus so much on yourself, what you do or don’t do, why you are the way you are, what are you hoping to find? “I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing.” (Bible) You, despite your heartfelt efforts and examinations and analysis, are not going to find something to feel good about there in your flesh. The way you get your shine back is by freeing yourself from those things holding you back. Quit examining and placing yourself in an open courtroom. God already said you are not guilty. You are not who you are today, shining, by anything that you initiated or worked out with good behavior. The real you, the new you, came from the factory shining brilliantly. It came without corruption or even the capacity to become corrupted. You shine as that becomes your chosen focus. The light you received came via the work of another man, a perfect man. All of that sin, all of that perpetual worry, all of that need for hyper vigilance ended when he declared it is finished. What was finished? The sin problem. It is no longer necessary to be consumed with yourself and whether or not you are always doing what you are supposed to be doing at all times, forever. It is finished. You don’t have to hate your own self anymore. Instead you change your subject of focus back to the light. The more you focus on the light, the brighter your life becomes. The more you focus on yourself and your imperfections, the dimmer your life becomes. Don’t let your light be dimmed by your own imperfections.

Think of it this way. God seeks to make you whole. Body, soul and spirit. He desires for you to be made whole. In order to be whole, you have to be fully integrated. If a part of you is not integrated, then you will have division within yourself. When you are divided inside, you versus you, your life will be full of defeat. Not because God wills it even remotely, but because you cannot be strong when you are divided inside. The fastest way to defeat an enemy is divide and conquer. Every time you got pulled back into that mindset where you were inspecting your life looking for flaws, you were being divided. Each time every good act of God was dependent upon the purity of your flesh in order to arrive, you were being deceived and divided. You have to stop hiding yourself from your own flesh. There’s nothing wrong with your body or your feelings. Welcome to humanity. Don’t be lulled into hating your own flesh. Recognize it came defected and will never quite match up as it should. Instead of trying to wrestle it back together, let it go. Let it be what it is. Accept yourself, the good, the bad and the ugly. You’re not at war with your flesh. The fight has already been won. Tell that old man to be quiet. Change your focus back to the light. Focus in on the light and accept what God did to solve your problem. You don’t have to add anything to it, it is already shining. Shine brightly for God with all your imperfections.

Just some good thoughts…