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ALISHA BREWER NELSON: Wind In Our Wings

When you are raised in a home by people who are not Christians, who are not living by Biblical principles – who are broken, sin sick, confused, lost, seeking fulfillment and happiness in all the wrong places – your view of reality tends to be very skewed.

You are seeing the world through someone else’s dark, distorted lens. You don’t actually see things for what they really are. You see them as you are taught to see them, how THEY learned to see them.

It is the perfect picture of the blind leading the blind. It’s like being given a map that has been turned upside down and half of it blackened out. It makes life incredibly difficult to navigate. In fact it makes it almost impossible. And you have no idea why you’re having such a hard time, especially when everybody else seems to have figured this Life thing out.

You have been taught and given this map to guide you, so why am I floundering around so badly? Why do I find myself in deep water and drowning a lot?? You don’t know that your map is bad. You don’t know that the teaching you received wasn’t the truth. You have no idea that you’re stumbling around in the dark and that the lessons you were taught to go down the road don’t actually work. In fact, they make things harder. So you spend most of your life completely confused, like you were given a machine to run but with the wrong directions;  you still try to keep making it run anyway. You don’t have any choice.

Perceptions, attitudes, fear, worry, relationships, worth, work, fun, happiness, peace are all seen in the wrong light. And this is where Jesus comes in. He says, “I am the light” and He is. When He is invited into a life, usually because you just can’t stand the darkness any longer, He sheds His light everywhere. You can finally see. The good and the bad, how things really are, what the truth is.

For some people, like Paul in the Bible, this is a blinding, life-transforming light that changes everything immediately. For others of us, this is a glowing light that God uses gently over a great deal of time, change coming slowly but surely.

He sheds the light of His love in you, showing you how loved and treasured you are. He sheds His beautiful light in your dark places exposing sin-sickness, disease, wounds, addictions, and He then heals and delivers. He sheds His transforming light in your mind and shows you what the truth is, how to view things, people, situations as He sees them. He transforms our thought-life, giving purity and wisdom and beautiful truth.

And then you can see, really see for the first time. You throw out the old map. You replace the incorrect teaching with The Truth, His Word. You’re not stumbling or flailing or drowning anymore. You’re not in darkness anymore. The path is clear and so much easier! You can now see beyond the end of your own nose and suddenly see the deep need around you and amazingly, you want to do something about it. Relationships become better, you begin to understand how you can actually love your enemies, because you now see others as God sees them – lost, confused, stumbling, in pain, with a bad map and wrong directions – and you feel such compassion because you know exactly what that’s like and how hard it is.

You want to show them The Way.

The stress and anxiety are gone. The worry and fear are gone. You finally see your Provider, your Father, your Brother, your Friend. You see Him. And you are transformed.

Alisha Nelson is a city girl learning to live off grid on a mountain in Montana with her husband Butch. You can follow her at the Roanoke Star as well as her blogs:

The Funny Side of the Mountain

Wind In Our Wings

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