The first week of 2017 has come to an end and I hope that we have each taken a moment or two of fair reflection on the year past and set some new dreams in motion for this one. We welcomed some newbies, said painful good byes to some golden oldies and experienced a whole 365 pages of our own biographies.
Before we get wordful in the moments to follow I just wanted to share what I am most grateful for at the end of this first week. I am grateful for the fact that I can articulate my thoughts without the help of a translator, ever so grateful that I have eyes that can perceive the goodness of God, ears that I can be taught and moved by the words of others and eternally grateful that I have a changed heart because for the first time in my life I have a hint of what the deepest love we can ever know feels like. I am forever enthused even through the tears and religious weirdness we have to live with because it is not I but he who lives through me. Forever awed by his omniscience and omnipresence through it all.
The beginning of a thing is always a hopeful event filled with hidden opportunities and sudden bursts of colour in places you least expected to find it. That is the beauty of mankind, the fact that we were created and not made. Isn’t it refreshing to know that something as simple as dust held the most sophisticated creation within its grains and it was designed exactly so by the master designer, author and finisher of our faith. There are many interesting theories as to how man came about on the earth, some of them logical and some of them a bit too far out of the box, but I choose to focus on a more hopeful reality. Hopeful because we have faith and it allows us to live in expectation of greater things, brighter days at the end of the storm and salvation after a good fight in this realm.
Our creator lives and does not change, he doesn’t sleep nor slumber, in fact he knows the number of hairs on our heads and formed us while we were yet distant childhood dreams to our parents. He has an infinite purpose for our lives and when we involve him he leads us as no man can, he moves us and moulds us forming the features that uniquely define us as his fearful and wonderful creations. When I think of being made in his image I am awed because never has such an image ever been so diverse but so exactly the same. So great and mystical is it that we cannot humanly quantify it yet we live and love and grow as a population adding more unique codes to the genetics of the world. God is an artist, a scientist and a dream setter, it is only in our likeness to him that we are able to achieve even a third of all that we can conceive.
As you go into the months that follow focus on his greatness and the inherent greatness in us because we are his. His image is above all the trials we could ever encounter, above all the trouble we could ever endure and above all the weapons that could ever be fashioned to destroy us. When you wake up another day in this life just visualize the victory in your next breathe because it is the most visible sign of a battle won. Death fights life everyday and here you are able to face another chance at life. Its been hard trying to deal with our Zimbabwe at the moment, but when I think of that I am encouraged that maybe just maybe I will be there when we finally become the nation we were always meant to be. In HIS image….
