Radiant Diamonds Bursting Inside Us — Small Stories of a Big God

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV)

“My parents lived a charmed life,” she says as we dismantle it. We sit in her childhood bedroom, drawers open revealing stacks of unsent Christmas cards, paper-clipped newspaper articles with hand-written notes in the margin, photo albums of last century college days. Her twenty-year-old father looks up at us in black and white with a lazy smile - stopped in the middle of work at a drawing board.

“You should keep this one,” I say as I pull that photograph away from its place with the others. It is raining outside.

This is daunting, overwhelming, unending it seems… This business of cleaning out the happy home where my friend’s parents had dreamed their dreams, made their beds and laughed at the dinner table.

Bookshelves and chairs are in the wrong rooms with initialed sticky-notes, on their way out the door and to a new life somewhere else. Plastic bags hold well-worn sheets and age-stained tablecloths. Cardboard boxes refuse to close, heavy with books of fiction and travel and photography.

My friend insists on carefully wrapping the ceramic vases and pottery Santa Clauses on their way to Miracle Hill. I remind myself that this is important – this gentle preservation of what is passing out of her hands and into the hands of strangers. Her parents have kept these objects of clay and shiny glaze safely in their cabinets for a generation and there is both sentiment and hope as she sends them out to find a new place in this world.

I think of the passage of scripture: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay…” Broken and chipped, it is not the pot that is most important, but the power of the light from within. We all are broken jars…the light seeping through the cracks and the poorly glued repairs.

“Sit with me,” my friend asks, and we lay aside our work for the day. We sit on her childhood bed; we look out the wall of windows into the familiar stretch of lawn. And she tells me the story of the light entering into her life.

A friend invited her to church. She was a teenager. It was a revival. And the words of Preacher Piper cut through the crowded church and found her there in the balcony. Those words carried light and life and God’s Spirit filled her and lifted her. All of these many years later, her light glows from deep within; this light of God growing stronger, preparing her for an eternity of glory.

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 2 Corinthians 4:6-8

These outer, visible things will pass away. It is what is unseen that has value. God reminds us that this earthly home is temporary. It is baked clay and wood, glass that easily shatters.

What we look forward to with God is a Home eternal; a home not made with human hands. A home where the light of God fills the city, and the sun and the moon and the stars no longer shine – for there is no darkness. No loss. No tears. No packing away of precious things. No saying goodbye and locking the door. Light and life that never ends.

I can’t imagine… Can you?

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV)

Needtobreathe Multiplied

Songwriters: Nathaniel Rinehart / William Rinehart

Your love is like radiant diamonds
Bursting inside us we cannot contain
Your love will surely come find us
Like blazing wildfires singing Your name

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGF-MGGLpB0