I once saw a sticker in a friend’s room that read – ‘This year, it is my turn to shine’. So I asked him – ‘whose turn will it be next year?’ He said, ‘well, I may also shine, but it will be more evident this year’. He appeared to sure of this year, but not of the subsequent years. His words made me remember Proverbs 4:18 – “The ways of right-living people glow with light; the longer they live, the brighter they shine” (MSG).
It’s not God’s intention that we flourish in turns just as birds don’t wait for one another before they can fly. There is enough room for all of us. Our ‘tomorrow’ should always be better than our ‘today’. When we say ‘the good old days’, it should be because we are experiencing ‘the better new days’.
Can a fish say – “this year, it is my turn to swim”? It doesn’t make sense right? We have to exercise care to ensure that we do not keep on treating the rule as the exception. The default makeup of a believer is that he would always shine. 2 Corinthians 2:14 makes us understand that we serve a God who always causes us to triumph in Christ.
However, there is a reason why we sometimes have rising and falling experiences. We were taught initially in school that the sun rises from the east and sets in the west. A further study revealed that the sun does not rise, but because the earth is constantly rotating, we have day and night depending on which part of the earth faces the sun. Such is the case with our experiences with God; all his resources have been made constantly available to all believers in immeasurable quantities, we are the ones who are always changing our principles, thought patterns and actions.
Beloved, the ball is in our court. As long as we are not meandering between conflicting principles and keep our eyes steadfast on Jesus plus his ways of doing things, we can be very sure that “the longer we live, the brighter we shine”.
tope aladenusi
