The other day we had an exciting time preparing and taking our annual family photographs. I tend to do things at the last moment. Monday I woke up and thought what a great day for family photographs. I checked everyone's schedules and set a time and place. Now the real work began, we had to pick out clothes for each of us. Do we have a theme? Are we going with a matching style, or matching colors. One of my daughters enjoys planning these things and helped me. What a task. We don't all have the same colors or styles. We laid out many different outfits for each of us before coming to a settlement. This took a couple hours. We got dressed, hair done and quickly headed out the door. My mom met us at my sons college and took our pictures there. I had some ideas and she took around 100 pictures. We looked at the little screen and thought we had a couple good ones and off we went. When I got home I put the pictures on the computer and much to my dismay the majority of them were quite blurry. What happened? I looked at my setting and couldn't figure it out. Then it hit me, check the lens. Oh no, it was very dirty and most of our pictures looked quite out of focus. It was easy to delete over half because the focus was not good and even more because someone was blinking or looking off to the side. I worked with it for a while and got several that are fine.
This got me thinking. I often wonder is my life in focus? Do I see things the way God sees things? Am I pleasing my God? While growing up, the church we attended had some very strict guide lines. I never understood some of them. I was a challenge to my youth pastor. I would question the rules with no real satisfaction of the answers I received. As I got older I heard Christians talk about the "freedom" we have in Christ Jesus and how a lot of rules are burdens. It is so easy to be influenced by the people that surround you, the teaching you are under, or society as a whole. How easy it is to go to one extreme of the other. I have made mistakes in my training of my children based on the outside influences in my life. The Bible says that we need to "seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness." Matthew 6:33. Are we as a Christian society truly seeking the kingdom of God? In Philippians 2:12,13 the Bible says "Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." How many of us are doing that? Truly we must seek the Lord in every area in our lives. Open our hearts to his plan. Seek God in prayer and in his word. If you are in a close relationship with God He can reveal to you areas that need to be cleaned up. Don't ignore His tug on your heart. Then find mentors. Do you know others who are where you would like to be as far as their relationship with God, their relationship with their family,and their relationship with others? What is it that Christians do that help them to have Godly families and God's blessings in their life? Seek people that have good fruit and see if that is someone God would have you to learn from. I am so glad to know that God is still working on me. There was a song I knew as a child... "He's still working on me to make me what I ought to be. It took him a week to make the sun and the moon, the earth and the stars, and Jupiter and Mars. How loving and patient he must be because he's still working on me." My challenge to you today is to seek God and question the morals you hold. Do they line up with the Word of God or do you use the idea of "freedom" to sin? There is no freedom in sin only bondage. We are to be the light of the world. Hold fast to God's Word, may God's peace and joy be with you always, and may the world see a difference in us. Clean your lens daily. :) God bless, Alicia
