Stars...

Philippians 2:14-16a

"Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, cchildren of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life....."

How do stars shine? Unyieldingly, brightly, steadfastly, beautifully... without being influenced by anything going on around them- it doesn't matter if there's a lunar eclipse occuring... the stars just keep shining, fixed in their part of space.

We are called to shine like stars. But how often do we begin shining as stars, only to bend under the pressure of society around us, and begin to "blend in"? Stars cannot blend into the darkness. They are fundamentally opposite of cold dark nothingness- they are bright, warm, (well, hot, actually) and something. Neither can we, as Christians, really blend into the lost world around us, because like the stars, we are different from the world around us. God created us to be different, and saved us into being different, and it is our task now to show the world just how different we are in Christ... and how good that difference is, and to show them the way to become different as well.