I am going to TRY to get back into blogging. I have appreciated the comments from two of my followers that they miss it. Sorry I've been gone so long....a bit of blog-burnout plus the busyness of the ministry have made it easy to let the blog slip. So here's my first Advent blog entry.
A couple of months ago I took two pictures of a rose in our church sanctuary. The rose was in celebration of a new baby. In the first shot, I had the camera on automatic so it did what any decent camera should do...it "averaged" the amount of light in the scene and made an electronic best guess. Though it is a high-tech camera, it is not equipped with a mind-reading sensor so it did not know what part of the picture was the most important. Its "averaging" approach washed out the rose.
I then made one simple adjustment. I set the camera to "spot" metering which means it only measures the light in the small area I point to, in this case, the rose. Basically I set it to "ignore" the rest of the room, and to only consider the light reflected from the rose. You can see the difference....
The REAL lesson here is that Christmas is what you make it. You can focus your attention on everything, and end up "averaging" your time, commitments, and participation between the culture's idea of the holidays, and God's idea. In doing this, you may find your focus on Jesus lacking detail, like the washed out rose in my first picture. A better solution for Christ-followers is to focus on Him first, daily, and, yes, even on Dec. 25th. If you do that, an amazing thing happens....it makes the whole picture of Christmas more beautiful.
Can people tell by looking at the picture of your life, what you're truly focused on? I hope so. That's why we're here; to point people to the beauty of a Savior's love, born in a manger, slain on a cross, and risen to be our Lord. May you have a Christ-focused Christmas, and a Christ-focused life from here on out!
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