They say that a picture is worth a thousand words...
and I have thousands of pictures from my time in Peru this summer.
So what do I do with these words?
I can hold them inside of me, caught within my heart, protected and safe, ready to relive whenever I want to escape the present for a moment in the past.
I can write them upon my mind, reliving each experience through mental narratives that never leave the walls of my mind, forming a dusty bookshelf of unspoken books.
I can speak them from my lips-- the sweetness of God's love story for his children
being poured out for all who will listen.
All of us live life, and whether or not we have pictures, there are words that we are given to speak. Instead of the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words," I believe God is calling us to live a life in which He is saying "Your life is worth never ceasing to speak words."
Our lives are testimonies of God's protection, love, grace, provision, discipline, and guidance. We are to speak, not because of all that we have accomplished and can brag about but rather because God is the Author of each of our lives. He desires that we put our stories out there, allowing our lives to be "read" --
spoken as hope to the hopeless,
told as grace to the struggling,
released as a second chance to the lost,
published as peace to the brokenhearted.
We cannot hold or trap what He has written in us, for if we do even the rocks will cry out.
So what does this mean for you?
Well, for me, it means sharing the chapters of my life that I have deemed unworthy of sharing, opening up the sections that I have dismissed as absent of God's pen, and releasing the clips and glue that hold some pages stuck together. For me, I am to speak of all that God has done, is doing, and will do, but I am not to do this for any other reason than that the Author has chosen to write it and therefore I am responsible to give the story away.
Allow your life to be a collection of words that is read by many, highlighted for the depth of God's truth within it and faded from being over-read by those going through the same thing.
Allow your life to be a book that screams of God's penmanship and presence, especially through the most difficult times, for when those who do not know the Author read of it, they will find Him and not just a next best-seller.
This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long...
