Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Look for His word in everything and let His light shine!


This past week has been filled with Super Bowl parties and the festivities surrounding the game. They have shown every angle and strategy that can be thought of pertaining to playing the game on Sunday. They have had programs voting on the top commercials, ones showing all the prices of the stadiums, and everything else imaginable. What they hadn't done until today was show the human side of the game.

I normally don't watch all of the pre-game shows but today I watched a few. I am so glad I did as I found that God, if not a football, knows how to reach football fans through the stories.

There were a few stories that stood out to me. The first was of Matthias Kiwanuka and his family's legacy, his grandfather being instrumental to bringing democracy to Uganda only to be executed for speaking out against Idi Amin', his mom working nonstop to ensure that her children would have the best education and know a better life than she had.

Zoltan Mesko beginning his life in Romania under a tyrannical communist regime, his family covering him with pillows as the revolution was going on right outside their apartment. They eventually sold everything they had, got on the lottery to get into America, a place where if a person can believe it can happen, it can happen.

Both families sacrificed everything to make sure their children would have a better life than they had. While watching these stories I started to think of how our heavenly Father did exactly the same thing. God sacrificed living as God to come to earth and live out the same struggles that people have been going through since our beginning in the garden. He knows pain as he has seen the worst that man can do, he knows loss as he gave up his only son to bring salvation to a people who couldn't have known it on their own.

After watching these stories and thinking of what these families had sacrificed and God's sacrifice for us it made the game a little less important. It actually had me wondering how we can spend four hours before a game talking about a game that lasts roughly three. How we can spend three and a half million on ads that last thirty seconds, or how once a year we hear a few stories about the triumphs of life that are happening around us every day, we are just blind to them.

I guess the story and comment that hit me more than any that day was the one about Steve Gleason the former Saints star that was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. He is battling a debilitating disease and his wife's main comment was "I hope he doesn't lose his voice as he is able to touch so many lives with his story and words."

I know this has been a slight variation from what I normally write but hope that it makes everyone think how we are here to be God's light. We can either let His light shine through us every day or we can keep the light under a shade and like these stories only let it shine once a year or when it is appropriate.

Isaiah 9:2
The people who walked in darkness
Have seen a great light;
Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
Upon them a light has shined.

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