Tinted - Tainted

September 9, 2013

Good Morning My Beloved Ones,

            I pray that you hear the still small voice of God amid all the noise and chaos of life around you.

            Today I want to talk to you about “tinted and tainted”.  There’s a country music song that talks about “these rose colored glasses that I’m looking through that show only the beauty and hide all the truth.”  Have you owned a pair of glasses like that?  We probably all have at one time or another.  These tinted glasses give us a distorted or tainted view of reality.

            Another pair of tinted glasses we are prone to look through at times are the sepia-toned glasses of Nostalgia, fondly known as the “good ole days”.  Remember when pot was something you cooked in, being gay meant you were happy and gas cost less than $1 per gallon?  Boy, those were the good ole days!  But just like the rose-colored glasses, our vision with the sepia-toned glasses of nostalgia is often tainted.

            A prime example of this is found in Numbers chapter 11.  The children of Israel were growing tired of the manna which God miraculously supplied for them in the wilderness and they started reminiscing about Egypt.  “We remember the fish we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic.”  They saw all the varieties of foods available in Egypt through their sepia-toned glasses, but somehow failed to see the back-breaking work of making bricks from sun-up to sun-down, being required to meet a quota without being given the materials necessary to do the job and being whipped by the taskmaster when they inevitably failed.  Some of them were so moved by their distorted vision of the past that they even talked about going back to Egypt!

            We, too, are sometimes tempted to return to the past we’ve been delivered from because we only remember the good times and fail to see the heartache through our sepia-toned glasses.  Because the apostle Paul knew the danger of this, he gave the following advice in Phillipians 3:13, “but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

            Do you long for the good ole days, beloved ones?  Take off the tinted glasses that taint your vision and you’ll realize that the good ole’ days weren’t all good.  It’s time to forget the things which are behind and reach for the things which are ahead of us.  For now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see Jesus face to face.

            Giving up my tinted glasses, your sister, Raelynn