Building on last year’s much appreciated GLOWing window and gifts for 31 October and our 1 November gallery of saints, we decided to grow the GLOW by simply refreshing our windows and increasing the number of neighbourhoods where our pray-ers were ready to give out gifts in. It’s been a great few days!
We began, as ever, by creating glowing pumpkins together in morning worship (below), and then went simple and bright with part 1 of the window itself (above) – serving the message to have its maximum impact:
A couple of our pray-ers made up this year’s #MadeToGLOW gift bags (below) and arranged distribution to different neighbourhoods in our area, and each pray-er involved in the giving ran out… one even had their heart pumpkin taken too!
Reactions were really warm – children loved getting a whole goody bag, and were excited by the badge and stars as well as the chocolate. A simple message about Jesus’ light and love (above) explained why we were giving the bags, and why all of the pumpkins at pray-ers’ houses were carved with hearts:
Then this morning, the main event started. We cleared out all our pumpkins from our window and resurrected a slightly smaller selection of our full gallery of GLOWers from history. (You can visit the gallery here to find out exactly who’s featured and what each one did to shine the light of love.)
This year we grouped the saints under five phrases designed to help unpack more of what it really means to GLOW with Jesus’ light:
By loving indiscriminately – seeing God’s value for every person.
By loving creatively – to find new ways to tell old truths.
By loving intelligently – to explain more of God’s creation.
By loving materially – giving generously to help others.
By loving uniquely – however we were all created to shine.
The window’s only been up half a day – we’ve not even had the chance to photograph it GLOWing in the dark yet – but already lots of people have stopped to look at it in detail, and find out what it means to be Made to GLOW.