Prehnite

I am healed in spirit and comfortingly transfigured. 

     Pale, mystical green in color, prehnite looks like what tranquility feels like. It was the first mineral to be named after a person; Colonel Hendrick von Prehn was the first to bring specimens back to Europe. It often forms in nodules or grapelike masses in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, as well as other parts of the world like the US.

     Prehnite is often called a stone of peace and healing. People turn to a million things for comfort, worldly desires and indulgences, and time and time again they find that they're still where they started. While the stone itself holds no power of healing, all of Creation can serve as a reminder of the beauty and peace of the Lord, and prehnite reminds me of the transformation that heals our lives of the habits and sins that hurt us. When we choose to follow God, there us an initial change in our hearts, but to truly find peace in Him we must grow in His ways.

     "Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you have learned in Christ!- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."

Ephesians 4:17-24

     As followers of the Prince of Peace, so too, like Him, we are to walk in His Peace, because our old, sinful self was shed from us when we put our faith in Him.

     "So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to their own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this in mind among yourselves. Which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

Phillipians 2:1-8

     The Lord instructs us on how best to mirror Him in our hearts and lives. When we do this, the peace and tranquility we find in Him is more than just superficial, but true peace, in the Holy Spirit, penetrating far beyond the surface. Like light shining pale yellow-green through a prehnite stone, we are a lens of what we worship, and when we exalt the Prince of Peace it naturally follows that peace beyond our understanding would fill us and shine through us.

     Ephesians 4:32 says, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ forgave you." We are called to live in true peace and holiness in God, living our lives as much like Christ as we can so as to be set apart by Him, so that people will know who we worship just by looking at us. The closer we grow to the Lord, the more like Him we become. Ask Him how you can grow in faith, and meditate on His ways, which are the right ways.