Set Your Mind on Things Above…

January 24, 2024

A friend and I pulled up to the house one morning after having breakfast. As I got ready to exit the car and head in, he said, “You should take a picture of that for one of your blog posts. Looks kind of neat.”

I took a few shots, downloaded the images into my folder for future use and didn’t think much about them. I’ve run across them each week, but they’ve always just been a “kind of neat” photo that held really no meaning for me outside of that.

That is, until this week. The photo shows the shadows of a crepe myrtle, that stands just to the side of our driveway, as they were cast onto my garage door. As I prepared to draft this week’s post, I felt God impress the following upon my heart.

“Was I looking at the garage door or the shadows?”

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I thought to myself, Now, that’s a great question. What was a looking at? I took the photo primarily because of the shadows, but in one sense the picture is a picture of my garage door, it just has shadows splayed across it.

Paul, with some assistance from Timothy, wrote a letter to the Christians in Colosse, to encourage them in a right relationship with Jesus Christ. Now, there’s a lot in this letter, but I want to focus on one short verse that packs tremendous hope for you and me.

“Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” (Colossians 3:2, NIV)

Our lives can often be like this week’s photo. We know we should set our minds on things above. We know what those things are. God’s will for us, our response to His leading, serving not only Him, but those He created, etc. In the photo, the things above are represented by the garage door.

Yet, instead of setting our mind on things above, we focus on earthly things. We also know what those things are. Getting ahead at work, making sure we’re producing enough so that we provide everything our family wants, being at the functions our friends expect us to be at, and sometimes even finding ways to get noticed for all we are doing. Colossians is meant to deal with some pretty heavy heresies that had occurred during that time. I also believe it can be applied to anything that takes our focus off God. In the photo, the earthly things are represented by the tree shadows.

So, here’s my question to myself. If my life is represented by this photo, what am I looking at or what am I setting my mind on? Of course, it should be the door, not the shadows. The door is way more important than the shadows. The shadows are kind of neat, but if the door wasn’t there, the shadows wouldn’t even show up. My prayer is that we take a moment to assess what we set our minds on and allow the Lord to be number one in our lives.