Hello friends!
Coming at you from Month 1 in Peru! We are currently training in Cusco with our amazing leadership team, and wow the Lord is already blowing my mind. We are being grown and stretched so much and my team already feels like family to me. Something we are encouraged to do (and you might also like to do) is to choose a verse for this year.
Luke 1: 46-47 My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
This is the verse the Lord put on my heart for this World Race journey, and I was challenged by my leader to put this into my own words. My brain went on a wild little ride (as it often does), but through this the Lord gave me revelation. This was specifically considering the word magnify.
Consider being an alien in outer space and observing our Earth: a gleaming, big beautiful ball of blue and green, cotton-candy clouds dotting across the landscape, cutting across the sky in a most elegant rotation. What a site to behold and an amazing reflection of our magnificent creator! As you sit observing this foreign but most captivating planet for the first time, you are in awe of its beauty. You get out your super-powered telescope to see if you can get a closer look. What you see astounds you: rivers that flow down from white-capped mountain-tops into plush valleys of green, hummingbirds buzzing in the trees, colors constantly shifting with the blooming of flowers or the changing of trees as the air grows colder, and people. The most spectacular of it all. People who are so unique and diverse and somehow exist in this beautiful unity together on this most beautiful Earth.
I began to ponder these two distinct viewpoints: that of Earth from outer space and that of Earth when it is MAGNIFIED. How much we would miss if we didn’t get out our telescope and see all of its unique and intricately intertwined parts! Each and every little piece of our magnificent Earth was created with purpose by the Lord. Even the tiny ant, which we often brush off as insignificant, is beautiful in His sight and serves a purpose in this world.
I want to challenge you with this question: do you see God as the distant Earth, far away and unaware of all that makes up the beautiful intricacies of his creation, or are you magnifying the Lord and seeking him out in each and every moment, place, person? Everything that exists in this world can teach us something about the Lord, each piece a reflection of his character and love for us. All it takes is using the right magnification lens to be able to see him. I encourage you to magnify the Lord by seeking him out in everything. The flower blooming up from the sidewalk cracks, the ant that carries 50 times its weight, and that guy at the coffee shop you see every day; is he just someone getting your drink or is he a young college student, who could really use a smile or an encouraging word. As we consider all that God created, we in turn get the opportunity to magnify him to others, proclaiming the beauty we see in them as a reflection of the creator!
My soul searches for the Lord in everything, and my spirit dances to the melody of God my Savior.
