Light in the Darkness

I have something I'd like to write about, and something I'd like to write down.

I'll go with About first.

Two years ago, my mom's friend Debbie introduced her to a devotional called Jesus Calling.  My mom has always been an openly religious person.  She enjoys taking her Bible and her coffee outside to the swing under the carport and reading/praying.  I am more of a private person in terms of expressing my love for God.  I pray when no one can hear me and I don't drag out the Bible in front of others, either.  I see it almost like religious PDA, and I'm not big on romantic PDA, either.  You know, a few hugs and kisses (in this case, maybe a Christian T-shirt or bumper sticker) is fine.  But making out (having an alter call) is outrageous to me.  My faith is no less than those who choose to be more public in their practices, but I just like to keep my one-on-one time with God down to just the two people it concerns.

Anyway, for Christmas 2011, my mom gave Justin and me Jesus Calling.  She said that it changed her life and that she hoped it would do the same for us.  Being the overly private Christian that I am, I didn't immediately jump on the devotional wagon.  After all, we all know how I am with daily activities!  2012 came and went without the devotional being used.  After doing some heavy-duty tidying near the end of the year, I came across the devotional in our bedroom.  I decided to go outside my comfort zone a little bit and give it a try.

I've officially been doing the devotional thing for a month now, and some days are better than others.  There have been two days in particular when the devotional's entry really touched my heart.  The second time that happened was January 26.  Here is the entry from that day:

I'm sorry it's a little blurry.

The part that took breath from my lungs for a second was, "My Light shines most brightly through believers who trust Me in the dark."  For each entry, the author puts verses at the bottom that she thinks either remind her of the entry, or were the inspiration for the entry.  I looked up John 16:33, and here is what my Bible said:

It turned out that the passage in question was part of a piece called, "I Have Overcome the World." As you can see, the piece talks about how we will always have problems, but that we should lean on God, since He has already overcome everything.  He knows what to do to get through things, and to solve problems, because He is all-knowing.  I truly believe that.  I love finding new verses to express my feelings.  It's so comforting.

I'll be honest since I'm apparently baring my religious soul today; I don't really accept the Bible as the absolute Word of God.  I think of the Bible as a really long game of telephone.  God/Jesus didn't write anything in here, everything in this book was written by someone who was either inspired by Jesus' teachings, or just the writer just simply jotted down their thoughts on things.  It's like a blog.  I'm a former journalism major, and sourcing means a great deal to me.  I'm willing to believe that some things in the Bible are absolutely true.  It makes every bit of sense to me that God/Jesus would have said/done those things.  But then there are things that clash so much with the general message of the Bible, it couldn't possibly have come from the same person.

I suppose this is becoming a topic for another day.  My main point for the above paragraph was to say that even though the Bible is essentially a very inspirational book to me, I still take a lot of its writing whole-heartedly, and this passage was one of those writings.  It made my heart happy.

Yesterday, one of my worst fears came alive when a group of tornadoes was headed for Durham.  I spent most of the day praying that no harm would befall my family or loved ones, and thankfully nothing came of it.  The weather report here had been clear about the order of patterns for the day, though: first we were supposed to get morning showers.  Then it would be very cloudy all day.  Then there would be around a one-hour period where the skies would clear.  Then all hell would break loose.  When we finally reached the clear hour, I snapped this photo:

For me, this was the light in the darkness.  If you stare at this picture long enough, you almost see the clouds moving.  God was telling me that we were going to be okay.  Among all the clouds and oncoming storms, there was this ball of light silhouetting all the trees.  It was exactly when I needed.

Deus Providet.  My new thing.

And now for the Down part.

After considering and wondering and more considering, I've made almost the full decision to move this blog to Wordpress.  I've been debating this move for the last several months, and I have some key reasons for doing it.

1. I found out sometime back in October that apparently my "photo storage limit" had been reached on Blogger.  I had no idea there was such a thing, and it seems like a complicated process to remove old pictures from the album they have apparently all been stored in.
2. I have been working with Wordpress since February 2011.  I began working at that time for an Internet solutions company that helps mostly self-run businesses advertise better.  This included setting up Web sites for them, and we used Wordpress for that (such an easy process, omg!).  In addition to helping set up the sites, I then maintained them, so I quickly learned most of the ins-and-outs of WP.  I guess I just like how to "do" things over there better than Blogger.
3. Blogger got picked up by Google not too long ago and therefore became linked to the email I used to open the account.  I use two different emails on a daily basis, and if I am not logged into the one associated with this blog, I can't access it.  Then I have to log out just to login to the other email for the sole purpose of accessing the blog.  I wised up and finally linked my other email, which is also a Gmail account, to this blog so that the login-to-logout thing wouldn't become as issue.  It's still annoying, though.
4. As you may be able to tell, I write book reviews.  I am currently in a phase where I am writing them more frequently than usual.  For the last several reviews that all deal with the same series, I have simply copied a prior post and pasted it, then substituted new stuff.  Every single time, I've had to go through the entire post and fix all sorts of random mishaps, like weird fonts or picture sizes.  WP offers an option to copy a post.  This will come in very handy for things like book reviews or other such posts that follow the same layout.

So, there you have it.  I am setting up shop today over on WP and will be good to go there tomorrow.  I think it's fitting that I would start in a new place in a new month.  I will miss being able to contort some of the HTML so freely on Blogger, but I think over time I can learn to deal with that.  And if for some reason WP doesn't work out, I can always come back.  I'm not going to delete this blog, just give everyone who visits a heads up to head on over to WP instead.

See ya on the flip side!