Sligo19: Growing in... Beauty
Miryam Lightbody is writing with VOX Magazine at the New Wine Ireland summer conference in Sligo this week. She’ll be looking out for speakers’ practical tips and methods that we can apply to see growth in our lives.
Monday 15 July
In Mark Melluish’s seminar on ‘Walking With the Father’ he shared on the importance of living a life of beauty and ways that we can grow this kind of Godly beauty in our lives. Here are some ‘take-home’ tips from his talk:
Focus on bringing life
If we walk with the Father like Jesus did we will walk as someone who brings life.
A good heart is made by feeding your heart not by avoiding sin, for if you’re really feeding your heart you will avoid sin.
Talk to God
Mark grew in beauty on a trip away with his family where he wasn’t getting his own way and his wife and daughter were. Alone he prayed: “Lord I need you to speak to me.” He heard God reply: “see how they’re talking to each other? Walk with me like they walk together.”
Mark describes how his wife and daughter lived out this beauty by stopping a stranger on the street to admire her shoes “it means that everything that comes into our field of view becomes part of our ongoing conversation with God.”
Value beauty
Do you ever feel, when you’re trying to explain the gospel that it all gets too complicated? You can say “let me tell you about the person who changed my life.”
When I meet God I’d much rather He said to me: “Mark, your life was a beautiful thing” not “you worked hard.”
Ask: will people see in my life and through my life something of the beauty of Jesus?
Speak life
If you speak life into people they find life
Mark encouraged a shy friend to speak and now she has an international ministry.
Mark describes the image of a father teaching his son to ride a bicycle. When the child fell again “his father didn’t say ‘you’re ridiculous’ he just kept saying ‘get on and try again.’”
Own it
We will only offer transformation to others if we know transformation in our own hearts
Walking with the father is about trying to live a beautiful life
Mark grows this beauty in his own life by “practising five minutes of silence every day. I can even sit on a bench outside, I just find it changes the day.”
Catch more of Mark’s seminars on Tuesday at 11.45am and 2.45pm here at Sligo19.
