You might have seen the #blackandwhitechallege going around Facebook and Instagram. I’ve enjoyed looking at friends different pictures of ordinary things from their daily lives, but when a friend challenged me. I kinda froze. I pondered it for a few days. Thought, “I’ll quietly ignore it and just not do it.” Part of me was thinking, “ain’t nobody got time for this,” but I was also honestly thinking I don’t have anything interesting to photograph for everyone to see. Yes, I love Snapchat. I’m on there a ton, but those are stupid silly things for the most part. My life, especially recently, has felt like a complete mess-out of control- not even a hot mess, just plain mess! So I reluctantly started out on the seven day challenge. The first picture is what I have above. I took it a while ago of one of my fave places to spend time talking to God. “Whew! Day one down!” As the days went on I started to learn something about the world around me I had lost amidst the stress, business, and hurt of this world.

I started looking at every day things of life in a new light. Every day scenes and object I began looking at with my creative artistic eye, but also what do the activities I participate in, the places I go, even the stuff I read or eat say about who I am, what I value, and my walk with Christ?

It hit me in an encouraging way when I met with a friend who inquired if I was challenged to a new version of the challenge. Confused, I asked her what she meant. She said that she thought is was a scripture or devotional black and white challenge since several of the things I posted where of that. I hadn’t realized that was what my go to had been. What I had chosen in most of my photos as something important that represented my daily life.

But it also hit me even deeper the other day.

I was pondering another conversation where a friend was encouraging me to pray before my quiet times. (Yes, I know for some this might be a duh!) But her encouragement was specifically to pray about the quiet time I was to have. So I started praying that not only would God speak to me through the verses I read, but that I would learn to look at His word with “freshened” eyes. That I would see something new in a scripture I’ve read or heard a thousand times. My heart loves creativity and something that will catch my attention and run with it. Too often I’d fly through the pages of scripture thinking, “yep, good stories, this lesson here, good point there,” and almost memorized even the application of the different verses to my life. Reading isn’t my favorite, so when reading looses its intrigue I stop reading. But praying this way has begun to help me see things in a slightly new way! And that has started to help me not sigh and dutifully read yet another, “read it so times before” passage, check off the list, write down the obvious memorized application, and get to finally watch This is Us on Hulu.

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people,”

‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭1:18‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Here are the rest of the week’s photos! Enjoy❤️