”Of all the gin joints”
(That is some Casablanca for you. Did you know that I speak fluent movie quotes? Because I do. Like a boss.)
First of all, congratulations on being AMAZING because only amazing people visit and interact with this blog. (In case you weren't aware, that's a requirement)
Secondly, I'm so glad you stopped by.
I bet your wondering who I am and why I'm writing a blog. (I wonder the same thing sometimes)
My name is Ashley and I am a Christian. Don't let that scare you, if you don't believe in God you're still welcome here, if you believe in a different God than the one I serve, you're still welcome here and if both of those statements made you question my Christianity, that's okay, you're still welcome here.
This blog is going to cover a lot of difficult subject matter and while I am a Christian, and I will be talking about God and faith and topics related to those two things, not everything will be about Christianity. Everything will be from a Christian's perspective because I am a Christian and it's from my perspective but the topics I'll be covering are human questions and struggles that everyone deals with. So whether you're a Christian or not, I hope you can find some clarity and some encouragement in what God puts on my heart to share with you.
Now, the title of this blog is very important to me because it represents a characteristic that I find essential in life and in my relationship with God. That characteristic is transparency. You see, the phrase "a glass kingdom" is what I imagine it would look like if we embraced that very biblical concept of transparency as Christ-followers in the kingdom of God. Often times, Christians put on these masks and facades of perfection because for some reason, we believe that imperfection is sinful and showing weakness is wrong. Unfortunately, beliefs like those separate us from other people and from God.
Here’s the thing, our struggles and imperfections are actually what God uses to draw us closer to Him and to one another. The entirety of Christianity is based on an admission of sinfulness and weakness and a need for God, and the more we grow in our relationship the more we come to realize we are nothing without Him and we need Him even more than we thought. So the idea that we can’t come to God until we have it all figured out, or we can’t come to each other messy and broken, or we can’t talk about the dirt beneath our fingernails and the mistakes we have made is just hogwash! We have to talk about those things because our struggles are just as important as our triumphs.
This blog is an unmasking, it’s a place of sincerity and authenticity. It’s going to get really real really quick, (Alliteration on point) and I hope that every person who reads this blog can find something in it for them.
I am by no means a perfect person, nor do I pretend to be. My punctuation and grammar is not going to be perfect, my stories are not always going to have happy endings and I have a penchant for run-on sentences but that’s real and that’s life and that’s where God shines through the brightest. I’m hoping that I can lead by example and maybe give you the courage to cultivate transparency in your own life and in your own relationship with God.
Welcome to A Glass Kingdom, leave your masks at the door.
p.s. If we're being really real, everything I just said scares me half to death because it requires so much of me but I guess, we'll just have to take it one day at a time. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Do one thing everyday that scares you". So for today, this is my "one thing". Cannot wait for tomorrow. (note the sarcasm. You'll be finding a lot of that in this blog. Fair warning.)
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