During April we’re focusing on being sensitive to God’s leading. Please see the Prayer page to read our strategic prayer request for this month.

By Erin Duplechin

There’s a constellation you can see here in the Southern Hemisphere; I looked at it for the first time two and a half years ago one night when the PNG skies were clear and bright.

“Oh look!  There’s the Southern Cross,” a friend of mine had pointed it out in excitement. This configuration of stars is represented on the PNG flag. I hadn’t known the connection before then.

Kevin and I had laid in bed that night and I told him about the constellation. He hadn’t known about it either- this group of stars that you can’t see in America. I never would have seen this beautiful cluster of bright beacons if I hadn’t moved here to PNG. “There’s something profound in that, isn’t there?” he said to me.

Sometimes you have to move to see the light.

And I think about how many times in my life I have stayed in the place where the light is dim, that I’ve chosen numbing distractions and hopelessness and depression instead of looking to Jesus, the Light of Life (John 12:46). For in Him, there is no darkness (1 John 1:5) and even darkness is as light to Him (Psalm 139:12).

And sometimes you just have to stop staring at the dark because even in the Valley of the Shadow there is brightness.

And I know that it’s easy to stay in the blackness sometimes- that sometimes the pain is justified and maybe if we stop feeling it then it’ll have been for nothing, or if someone has hurt us and we move on, maybe that makes what they did okay.

But let me tell you that there is something waiting for us that is basked in light.

“I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—