What Barney Will Teach You About Sharing Your Faith

You know those little kids songs you learn when you’re, well, a kid? Funny how I can remember so many of them now when I’m 21. One of those songs I remember was from Barney (yes, I did love that big, purple dinosaur). The words went something like this: You are special—special, everyone is special, everyone in his or her own way. Admittedly, this can sound really cliché, cheesy, or sometimes even insulting in our culture. But I’ve come to believe it’s true (not because I watched Barney though).

People are beautiful. Each one is unique: a photograph that will never be duplicated, a dance choreographed like no other.

So then, if each one of us is unique, what happens when one unique person has a relationship with another unique person? They form a connection that is just as irreplaceable as the people themselves. Because both people are unique, the combination is even more one-of-a-kind, and each person brings characteristics out of the other that would never be seen or manifested if the relationship had not taken place.

These truths shed an interesting light on my relationship with God. When I enter into a close connection with Jesus, He changes me in a way that no one else can. He makes me into someone I would never otherwise be, never could otherwise be. And, as I begin to get to know Him, I learn about facets of His character know one else would have discovered if I had not known Him. I see and paint a picture of God no one has ever seen before.

This is why it’s vital share our faith with others and that we not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as the Bible tells us. When you open your heart and share what the Father has been teaching you, when I open my mind and tell my experience, a new color is added to the larger picture of God Christianity is painting for the world.

Columbus, Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark—none of them discovered the entire world by themselves. Each traveled valleys and mountains, sailed oceans and crossed rivers to make their own discoveries in each part of the earth. And the rest of civilization benefits from their exploits. God’s character is comparable to a universe in its vastness and no one person could explore it exhaustively. As we each experience God and feel about and grope after Him, we’ll discover nooks, crannies, and landmarks in His character that we can share with each other. We’ll get to know Him better in a community, each of us with a brush in hand as we paint a more stunning picture of the Father. And with every color contributed by each member of the body, the painting will continually evolve and swell into greater strength, beauty, depth, and truth.

But what if I never take the time to get to know Christ or make sharing Him a priority? Could I be leaving parts of Him buried forever, like beautiful gems hidden deep in the earth? Might God not smile quite that way or laugh just so in heaven simply because I’m not there to bring out that side of Him? What if my distance from God leaves His portrait incomplete?

So I leave you with this: you are unique. You are special. You have something to share with the world that no one else does. Please open your heart and show me the parts of God that I don’t know and that no one may ever know if you don’t paint that picture of Him for the world to see.