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Jeff

Black and White.


Over the last month Cheri and I have been working tirelessly to clean and paint Ohana Court, the campus basketball court and auditorium. A couple weeks ago I was setting up for an event when some people passed through. One turned to another and said, "This is worst color they could have painted the wall. See, it just shows the dirt. You should never paint walls light colors."  Everything in me wanted to approach them and inform them of all of the effort that went into choosing and obtaining the paint color that was currently on the wall and all of the reasons why it was the color we chose. Instead, I went about my duties.  

I had nearly forgotten about it when the Lord brought it back to memory. I clearly heard him say that the wall color is supposed to show dirt!

In fact, it should be our goal. Light colors show dirt. Dirt that is visible is easy to remove. Quite often in our lives, we desire to choose colors that hide dirt. Those colors camouflage reality, making things seem nicer and more well-kept than they might really be. The difficult part of this is that when things are designed to camouflage, they work best at a distance; when you approach them, dirtiness is still abundantly apparent. If our lives are structured in such a way to hide the dirt, our desire is to keep people far enough away that our lives appear pretty. We become afraid of what might happen when people get too close, because our dirt is difficult to hide when there is so much of it in our lives. 

The good news is that if our goal is to become light, to make a high contrast between the dirt in our lives and the thing that God created us to be, it is no longer difficult to see where we need to change. Ultimately, it makes it that much easier to remove. There is freedom in exposing the dirt. You might be in the process of removing it still but it becomes far easier to remove if people around you are aware of what is there. It provides motive to relentlessly chase freedom.

For too long, I have been stuck chasing the shade that best hid my dirt. In the last few months God is teaching me to expose the dirt, the hurt, the things that are holding me back. The best part, the moment I decided to quit hiding my stuff was the moment I began to be truly the most free. The things that had held me back in the past no longer had power to control me. 

I don't need to hide anything about me because I am called to be holy. Holiness exemplifies the light, it doesn't try to find the darkest shade of light possible to be still considered light. It abandons the dark in relentless pursuit of the light. At the core this is what I am called to, it is what you are called to, and together we can become most like Jesus. 


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