This week's Glory Story comes from my group of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd First Graders that I have now had the privilege of working with for a second year!
As part of opening prayer in the atrium, we encourage the children to choose how we will pray by giving them multiple options to choose from: silence, song, open prayer, etc. This allows us to introduce the children to different ways someone can pray, and frequently the children choose to use Psalms.
This week, we read, "The Lord is my light and my salvation, of whom should I be afraid?" (Psalm 27), and I asked the children what they thought this meant.
One very eager boy replied, "Well, when I hear light I think of a jack-o-lantern." In my head, I was preparing to have to bring this back around to the Bible, but I did not want to cut him off, and he proceeded with, "You know how you have to take the gross out of a pumpkin before you can put the light in? Our hearts are like that, Jesus scoops the sin out, before he can put the light in."
Wow, okay, no redirection needed. He clearly had a point to this.
This got me thinking about how we needed to let Jesus clear out all the gunk before his light can shine through us. If you tried to put a light into a pumpkin before cleaning it out, the light would not shine through, but after all the "gross" (as he called it) was taken out, the light can be seen and shine through! What a beautiful image for us!
How can we better let the Lord scoop out the sin, so that His light can shine even brighter inside of us? The world needs Jesus' light so much right now, so let's allow Him to shine in our hearts!