Shifting seasons...shifting shadows?...

Today was an interesting day. It began to feel like fall. I love this time of year....I love wearing scarves, and coats, and gloves...the like. The one thing I don't necessarily enjoy about this time of year is that I begin to see shifting shadows of what I was previously in the past year.

I went to Africa the last week of July, and God truly rocked my world. It was so amazing to experience what we experienced there with my husband and our youth ministry. I vowed I would be changed from those weeks in Africa, but now come a month after our return, my old shadows are starting to creep on the walls again taunting me.

We saw incredible things there. We saw miracles and lives being changed. We both had courage to speak out about the love of Jesus, and his grace that so abounds in us. Yet one month later here I am, back in my routine of life, seeing the same people every day, yet without saying a word of what Jesus has done and what He could do in them. In Africa I had a realization, these children, these villages are no different from back home. They may look different, have different physical needs, but life is life, what is life without breath, nothing, what is life without hope, nothing. The same need is here as it was there.

I'm beginning to realize that I've once labeled life in order of importance, when I am not at liberty to label. Who am I that I should say they need Jesus, and they don't? I was in love with the children in Africa and knew we might be the only ones to be able to share God's love with them. But here, somehow my co-worker is different, someone else might come along. I thought these thoughts, and now the enemy is showing me shadows that I misinterpreted as a mirror. These shadows are only a mere distortion of my old self and how I used to be, but as it states in Ephesians 5:13 "Everything exposed by the light becomes visible", since I've been changed, God's light has now exposed my old self, I am now a new creation, I need new thoughts, new actions and new faith. The trouble is that the enemy will try to make us believe that the shadow is a mirror, a current representation of our present self. But we have to realize that we USED to be like that, that is the past, this is the present, who am I today who will I be tomorrow?

As the physical sun begins to fade and summer becomes a memory, let us not forget of the shadows we once were lest we forget where we came from and where we are now as the Son continues to shine in us. Africa, never leave me...