I was recently thinking of balloons and filling them up with Helium and bringing them to church - for the Church's birthday - because everyone seems to do that on Pentecost, but then I started to really think about this. And I had a revelation for me, but perhaps this isn't new to others.
What happens when we put different thing into balloons and how does that then relate to our relationship with God? Well when we exhale, we exhale Carbon Dioxide, this is a substance that is the waste of our breathing process. And what happens when a balloon is filled by our own hot air? It sinks. Relate this to God: when we let addiction, sin, food, negative thoughts or general negativity, and the list could go on; then our relationship with God is like that of the balloon filled with Carbon Dioxide it just sinks.
When you fill a balloon of nitrogen, which is what makes up most of the air around us, the balloon, just floats and moves across the air. It doesn't sink, it doesn't go up it sort of just is. It is easy to push it around. Relate this to God: when we just live our lives each day, moving around in the secular world without thought or regard to God. When we let the busy life of our world let us just float through life without purpose then we are like the nitrogen balloon. In this analogy, you have the ability to float down a bit or perhaps even float up a bit but that requires the movement by an outside force.
But when we fill a balloon with helium, it raises and keeps on raising. In fact, when filled with Helium it takes nothing more then the balloon and the Helium to raise, it comes from the essence of what that balloon is. Relate this to God: when we allow the Holy Spirit to truly work within us - by developing a relationship and trusting it, then we are able to raise above.
A balloon is just a piece of rubber, it has no other purpose until it is filled and becomes an actual balloon. Our lives can be purpose driven lifting us up by our own faith and relationship to new understandings or our lives can be filled with blah. Let us dedicate ourselves to following God's purpose and let the Holy Spirit fill us up.
