For Me:

If you can, imagine a room with many, many faces, all looking up at you. You  squint at the bright lights shining down and you quickly realize, you are about to perform.

Those who know you best and love you most will have front row seats to your life. They will most likely cry at all the sad parts and clap wildly for you when you succeed.

Then there are those around the room who sit in the back seats and they are the people who know you from afar; maybe from Facebook or brief hand shakes or passing hellos-even as they take your money in a drive thru. If they have interacted with you, they are in this great room and their eyes are on you.

Most children climb the stage of life and the bright lights and shadowed faces of their audience overwhelms them. They anxiously put on costumes and memorize lines. Exaggerating their best qualities and covering up their realities; hoping to please a room of people who are just as nervously desperate to be accepted as they are.
My Love, here’s what I want you to do.

Quiet the murmurs of the crowd. Their whispers or their shouts. Whether you mesmerize them or bore them. Let their faces stay in the shadows.

Focus instead on the Face in the very, very front row.

Do you recognize Me?

Many say that if I go unnoticed, I slip to the back but that’s not true. God always sits in the front, even if people imagine Him in the back. People think their imagination alters My identity because their imagination can alter their own but no humane idea of Me, sways Who I Am.

I am the Father of your spirit and the Producer of your performance, so I most certainly sit in the front row.

Here’s what I want for you. I want you to play out your life for Me. Only Me. Lock-eyes with Me if you need too. Turn the spotlights on Me if it helps but whatever you do on the stage of Planet Earth, do it confident of My presence and My smile.

Write for Me. Dance for Me. Sing for Me.

Balance a checkbook for Me. Clock into work for Me. Rock a baby for Me. Listen to the elderly for Me. Watch a Sunrise for Me. Eat a carrot stick for Me. Laugh at a 4 year old’s joke for Me. Pause and hold a hand for Me. Share a banana split for Me. Wipe a nose for Me. Do the dishes one more time for Me. Say yes for Me. Stand up for Me. Live fearlessly for Me. Choose joy for Me. Smile back at Me, My precious one.

When you do-the more you do- your life will feel less like a performance for the masses to judge and critique and more like a child- playing at the feet of her Father.

Playing is so much more freeing than preforming. So play for Me and let the crowd either "drop their stones" and join you or walk away.

"Whatever we do-even simply eating and drinking can be done for the glory of God."

-1 Corinthians 10:31