Luminous

By Kristi Cronin

Throughout our lives we may enter seasons of desolation and spiritual dryness. We may feel forgotten and overlooked as if we have entered a desert wasteland. In Luminous Kristi details the reality of these seasons and how God permits them in order to refine us and develop our character. We may not understand what God is doing in the wilderness, but if we trust Him and allow Him to work in us, we will come out of the wilderness a luminous new creation. Kristi has learned that God does His best work in the obscurity of the desert. My friend, your Promised Land is ahead of you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385011377

Kristi Cronin

Kristi Cronin is a wife, mom, nurse practitioner, and most importantly a follower of Jesus. She is the author of several publications in The Nurse Practitioner Journal and the author of Black Balloons: Will Pop for Freedom. She is passionate about serving locally in her own home as well as in her community. She also loves traveling and providing medical care while sharing the gospel internationally. She and her husband and two children currently live in Tampa, FL.

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Copyright © 2023 Kristi Cronin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1138-4 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1136-0 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1137-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023920930

WestBow Press rev. date:  11/09/2023

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Inside Out

Chapter 2 Something New

Chapter 3 Exodus

Chapter 4 The Social Experiment

Chapter 5 Rest

Chapter 6 On Repeat

Chapter 7 Pruning

Chapter 8 It’s Brutal Out Here

Chapter 9 The Body

Chapter 10 Frank

Chapter 11 Release

Chapter 12 The Wasteland isn’t Wasted

Chapter 13 Breakthrough

Chapter 14 Luminous

References

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to our beautiful baby girl who God used as a vessel for the concept of this book. You are one of a kind and chosen, my love. I can’t wait to see all that God has for you.

CHAPTER 1

Inside Out

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Ezekiel 36:26: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU felt personally victimized by the year 2020? If your hand didn’t go up, then you are a better Christian than me. Even if you didn’t feel this way, I am guessing that at some point in the year 2020 you stopped, looked around, maybe even got on your face before the Lord, and asked why? I don’t have the answers to the why’s that you have asked and may even still be asking. What I do know, is that God is the author and finisher of our faith and He wants to do a good work in you. A very personal good work that is specific to your life, your character, and your heart. This is internal work that is not for the faint of heart. Ezekiel 36:26 talks about how God will put a new spirit in you. When we repent and accept Jesus as our savior we receive the free gift of the Holy Spirit. The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in you and desires to fill you, guide you, advocate for you and refine you. He will change your way of thinking and He will renew your mind. He will change your heart from stone to a heart that is mailable, open, and able to receive Him and all He has for you. From this place, all of the fruits of the spirit flow out. He is willing and ready to change you from the inside out.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? We all want the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness and self-control. We want holiness, goodness, and loveliness in our lives. We want peace and wisdom. We want hope and a future. Sure, these are the things that we want but how do we get them? How do we get to a place in our lives where this is the absolute truth when everything around us is crashing? How do we come from a place of rest and peace? The Bible says that His yolk is easy and His burden is light (Matthew 11:28-30). I don’t know about you, but for so much of my life, I didn’t feel this. The burden was heavy and the word peace felt like a joke. It’s not a joke. God wants this for all of His children, but the way that we get there will look different for us all. There is a season in life that many refer to as a desert or wilderness. I thought that 2020 was this for me, but when I look back over my life these last few years I see that this season started years ago. 2020 just happened to be the year that kicked off peak wilderness season.

I’ll never forget the moment that this got called out in front of me. I honestly had no idea what I was going through but I knew it was uncharted territory. I was beginning to feel at a loss of how to continue to navigate the space that I was in. I was sitting in my counselor’s office spouting off about all the seemingly random things that were happening in my life and she all of a sudden stopped me. She looked at me and said, You are in the wilderness. At the time I thought, ok, sure, if that means I feel lost, alone, and afraid, can’t hear or see God anywhere around me, then yes I suppose I am. She was right, I was. I may still be coming out of it as I’m writing. I can begin to write about it because I’m starting to see the other side. There are visible glimpses of the Promised Land that He has for me. The funny thing is that going into this season, I thought I was doing great. I thought I had it together. I thought I was following Jesus and the plans He has for me. I was wrong. We are blind to our impurities until God exposes them and we have nowhere to hide.

Several weeks ago I was picking my kids up from school and as I strapped my daughter in I saw a new bracelet on her wrist. I said, When did you get this bracelet? She said, oh this (pointing to it), grandma bought it for me yesterday. It had tiny beads spelling out a word woven together with other colorful beads around it. I asked her what the word was and she shrugged her shoulders and said "it’s a big word, can you help me read it? I read it. The word was luminous. I said it out loud and made a big deal, emphasizing all of the sounds of the word, using a silly voice as I said it. She laughed and so did my son who was sitting next to her. As I went back to my seat on the driver’s side and strapped myself in I kept repeating the word luminous. I just kept thinking what a random word that was to be on my 5 year old’s wrist.

Several weeks later a new friend sent me a link to study she was doing because I had mentioned that I was looking for something new to start. John Bevere’s study called The Wilderness was her recommendation (Bevere, 2). You can’t make things like this up. When God opens a door and is trying to get your attention, nothing can get in the way. I thought, wow that’s interesting that this is the study she’s doing. As I worked my way through the lessons I realized so many of the things he was saying were things I had been writing over the last few years. I didn’t know what was happening during that time but God was putting context to these years one realization at a time. Then, John used the word luminous to describe us. He said we become luminous after coming out of the wilderness season. I was stunned. As much as God has shown up for me throughout my life, I’ve still questioned Him. I especially questioned Him during the last few years. You probably have as well. If you haven’t, I’m not sure you’re being honest with yourself. Even in my questions, He was still personally pursuing me and He’s personally pursuing you too.

Luminous means: emitting or reflecting, usually steady, suffused, or glowing light, especially in the dark (Oxford Dictionary, 5). The word that stands out to me in the definition is steady. Before this unasked-for season in my life, I was still shaky. I might have thought I had the luminous light of Christ shining through me but He showed me that I didn’t. I wasn’t steady. I kept repeating the same patterns of sin and mistakes even though I thought I was free, or at least that’s what I told myself. I thought I was a Christ-follower but in fact, I was simply a Christian. There’s a difference, more on that later. I had impurities and blemishes that needed to be sifted through.

If God chooses you to become luminous you should consider yourself lucky. This makes me laugh because if you’ve walked through a real wilderness season you don’t feel that during it. I was recently asked if I was ready