Rekindle the Gift of God That Is in You
By: Lindsay Tedder
Have you ever watched a balloon over a period of time, as it slowly starts to lose its battle with gravity and begins the slow fade back down to the earth? No? I’m the only lazy person who keeps balloons until they are dying?
Over the years, we have celebrated many events with bright and fancy Mylar balloons. They cheer up any good celebration and add just the right amount of finishing touches, am I right? After the celebration is over, I try my hardest to give these balloons away and all too often, there are adorable little ones who are just too happy to take them off my hands! However, sometimes, these gorgeous, filled-to-the-brim balloons make their way back to our home.
They float around our living room for a week or so and then they slowly start to fade. You can see a visible deflation; what was once bursting with fullness and life starts to collapse under the weight of the gravitational pull that was once so easy to fight. The balloons start to look dull and empty.
If you are super lazy, like we are, then you will eventually see these former beauties begin to sink. They slowly drop from the heights they once reached and begin a downward drift that causes them to fall ever so gradually to the ground below them.
If these gravity-defying beauties can lose their luster and plummet to the ground because they haven’t been refilled - how are you and I any different?
The simple answer is we aren’t.
We are all too similar to these helium-filled balloons, only our filling comes from our Father. The One who knit us together in the womb, the One who knows every hair on our head, the One who chose us, who calls us His own, the One who forgives every wrong and breaks every chain. He is who fills us.
2 Timothy 1:6 says “Therefore I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is in you through the laying on of my hands."
Rekindle the gift of God that is in you. When reading this verse - this line struck me like a ton of bricks. The gift of God that is in you is already in you. It’s there. He already gave it to you. God gave each one of us gifts. The world has a tendency to bury those gifts under guilt, sin, shame, disappointment, abuse, neglect, loss. These gifts get smashed down, trampled on, and often lay dormant. They are tucked away so deep in our subconscious that retrieval seems impossible. However, God wants to renew those gifts; to rekindle that spark that was set in our hearts when He placed them in us in the first place.
We need to shift.
Shift our focus to our creator. To the One who looks at us and sees perfection in His creation. Where we focus our attention will determine our outcome. God is calling us to stop relying on ourselves. He wants you to embrace who He created you to be.
Are you like the gravity-defying-filled-to-the-brim balloon, showing off all your glory? Or are you deflating and losing ground at a slow fading rate? I pray you are showing off your glory, my friend!
As life happens, we will not always be filled to the brim. We will go through periods of life where we are on the slow fade. However, you must realize that you can only give the world what is in your balloon and the only way to fill your balloon is Jesus. It is essential to take the time, to make the time. I’m busy, yes, Lord knows I am busy. You’re busy. I see you friend - working your buns off, running the kids to a thousand events all over the city, somehow miraculously being in 5 places at once, trying to make it to the grocery store in between and put something with a semblance of health on the stove for dinner, scrubbing down dirty kids and dirty floors, rarely sitting down or taking a moment for yourself, trying to sleep and running through the to-do’s that didn’t get done, and waking up all too early to do it again.
I’m here to tell you, that while all of that running and emptying of your balloon is necessary and is good, it will leave you deflating and on a steady decline if you don’t take the time to breathe life back into yourself.
The only way to do that is to get to spend some quiet time with your King.
Connect.
Refill.
Ignite.
Renew.
Revive.
Rekindle.
Lindsay Tedder is a believer, wife, mom, bestie and writer who lives in Columbus, Ohio with her bearded, bourbon-loving husband and her too-cool-for-school toddler. She is full of raw honesty, enthusiastic authenticity, amiable compassion, humble grit, powerful passion…and outrageous laughter, double chins, real life, and frothy nectar-of-the-gods coffee…because…coffee. Raised by a hardworking single mom, she overcame such trauma as sexual abuse induced food addiction, the debilitating health issues associated with endometriosis, a decade of infertility, and recurring life themes of worthlessness. Connect with her at www.LindsayTedder.com.
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