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  Light in the window

  Jul 22, 2024

  This morning, I read “Enlightenment is the light shining in the window from the other side of the room.” I told my Sweet Al this is a wow statement. 

  “I could make a sermon out of this. What do you think it means?”

  “When I look out the window and see a deer, I’m enlightened to shoot it.” 

  Oh me, not quite what I had in mind. The light escaped him. He was clearly on the other side of the room, so to speak.

  I continued. “I’ve been invited to be a guest on a blogtalk radio station. The show is … designed to ‘Lead others out of darkness.’ I’m going to share with the audience about this enlightenment concept.”

  “Honey, you know so much, but you go over most people’s heads. They want simple things to apply to their everyday lives.”

  “But this is speaking to me. It’s like eating dessert.”

  “Just give me meat and potatoes, not all that other stuff.”

  For meat-and-potato guys, you might not get this enlightenment stuff. I’m talking about revelation insight, also known as spiritual discernment, which everyone needs today. Heavens, how desperately we need to have the true light. When I use the word “enlightenment,” this is light, not from us, but from another source. It’s more than turning on a light switch. It’s life-giving to our spirits. 

  “God is light and there’s no shadow in his turning,” as James writes in 1:17.

  Patti Shene, the radio host, interviewed me. She asked me to share with her creative audience how Christian writers and artists struggle in their journey, how they come out of their darkness and how they fit in the body of Christ. 

  I spoke about how an artist is wired. We have many ideas and will suck the air out of the room. Artists and writers work from the prophetic gift that is mentioned in the Bible. That means what we create might not have instant gratification. It might be for that other person 20 years down the way. They might not be ready to receive or have eyes to see what we see.

  We feel totally misunderstood. And most artists want one thing, to be understood. This is the journey of creative hearts coming out of darkness. God gives them light and people are standing on the other side of the room. Not that anyone rejects the light, but they’re not ready to understand it. Kinda like how my Sweet Al is looking for a deer to walk by. No deer. No light.

  Artists can definitely be obnoxious. People don’t take us seriously, yet we want to change the world. We live on the outside and tell everyone what we are thinking. We process out loud. We have too many things we want to do and not enough time to do them. 

  As artists, we don’t fit. Why? We fight the box. Our world in our minds extends beyond the box. We act like rebels but we are free thinkers. If we give in to the box and let the world dictate to us, we become part of the darkness. Believe it or not, all these personality traits are part of the dark hole that the creative mind fights against and pushes to climb out of into the light.

  At the end of the interview, I left her radio audience with a challenge: What does this statement mean? “Enlightenment is the light shining in the window from the other side of the room.”

  Revelation knowledge is like an “aha” moment when the light is revealed to your spirit. It’s not logical and can’t be explained.

  Natural light comes to the intellect through the senses. We acquire this commonsense knowledge by seeing, touching and smelling. This is different than something revealed to our spirits.

  I continued my soapbox moment. “Al, it’s this way. Physically, we haven’t stepped over the threshold into the other room, but where we are and what we’ve learned about God’s heart today, it’s like seeing the light shining through the window. We are gaining spiritual insight and discernment, which comes from another place. We actually have stepped closer to the window.”

  There are perks to getting older. Our state of understanding is more transcendent. We are freer from the tyranny of our own minds and other people. We have experienced a deeper spiritual peace, and we are more aware of our own wholeness. This is the journey coming out of darkness into the light.

  We are seeing through our false selves and layers of social conditioning. The box teaches us conformity and how to be disciplined. Then we step out of it into ourselves if we want to become our truer self and who we are meant to be.

  Final brushstroke: When we first came to the light, we were standing on the other side of the room. We’d catch a ray once in a while. As we have grown in the Word over these many years, we’ve moved closer to the window and the light is much clearer to us. I can almost hear the Lord breathe, “The secret to this life is My light brings life to all men. It’s worth the struggle.”

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