Choose To Shine

I have been asking God to unleash heaven, and in my mind this has been something completely outside of myself. Like the glory cloud descends from on high, apart, other, and accessing it is a crapshoot, a lottery, a game of chance. So we try to tip the scale in our favor.

Like hoping we put ourselves in the right place at the right time. Like hoping to catch God in a good mood or generous moment. Like hoping we choose the right songs and anointed texts, say the right analogy and sing the right spontaneous words with the right melody. Like hoping we didn’t do too much this week to piss God off or make Him withdraw with arms crossed, head shaking in disappointment. Like hoping we grovel enough and believe the perfect things and repent with enough of our heart.

If we do these and a million other nuanced and mysterious things, then, we believe, God will unleash heaven in our midst. Then we might see the glory cloud, hear his voice, be healed, weep, experience something, anything transcendent.

But we’re mistaken. We’ve believed, you have believed a lie. Yes, it has been passed down and passed around and reinforced many times over by others, but YOU believed it. In fact, you have not simply believed this lie, you’ve owned it. Ingested it. Adopted it to be truth about you and the universe and God. But it’s a lie.

You see, while you and I have eternally attempted to ascend to the transcendent, the only Transcendence has eternally descended. To you. To me. To we.

As we have spent our days perfecting our high jump form, contracting and releasing muscles, directing eyes upwards, clearing mind and heart in the right sequence, right timing, right rightness in just one more vain attempt to reach God, God has invited us to just the opposite. To let Him reach us.

Uncontainable power could not be contained by flesh, but He made His choice.

Infinite knowledge and understanding could not fit inside one finite brain, but He made His choice.

Love without an end cap could not be found between 65 beats per minute, but He made His choice.

Death could not be swallowed up by life, digested and broken down into pieces by hope, joy and peace, and evacuated from a tomb after 3 days, but He made His choice.

And the unleashing of heaven could not be limited by the agency of fickle humans, so that its presence and power came and went only as freely as they chose, but He made His choice.

And because of His choices, the darkness that kept you from seeing and hearing and knowing the transcendent has been expelled by The Light, who is your life, and the power of illumination has been transferred to you. You now have the power to shine! 

We do so by choice.

Choosing to create rather than destroy.

Choosing to bless rather than curse.

Choosing to engage life rather than numb ourselves to it.

Choosing to shine rather than hide.

Choosing to do so brightly. Boldly. Bravely into any pocket or stronghold of darkness you find in this world, with the same confidence you have that a dark room will be bright when you flip a switch. 

A dark room is a reality, but it is not truth. The truth becomes known as the contours of and objects within a room are revealed by light, thus dispelling that former “reality” of darkness.

So it is for those of us who are not only children of light, but ARE light in the Lord. When you choose to  illuminate reality with the light of your true self as defined by God, the darkness of the world fades and God’s Truth is revealed everywhere around you. At home. In church. On the playground. In the hospital bed.

What’s more, anything that receives your touch of light becomes a light as well, which continues a centuries old chain of re-creation. Someone chooses to be light, the illuminated life shines on “reality”, Truth is revealed, and those who were once darkness are offered the choice to be light and illuminate the world around them, beginning the process anew.

Heaven is not unleashed by God from somewhere out there in unpredictable ways at arbitrary times in accidental places. It is unleashed in every moment you choose to shine.

He made His choice. It is time to make yours.