Awaken Clermont: a Sermon on Hope
We wanted to share a beautiful interpretation of Finding Fireflies: GFG. Anthony Maccagnano heard about Finding Fireflies and spoke about it during his sermon on hope. Scroll to 55:30-1:02 of the video, especially 59-1:02, to listen. I have paraphrased the part that impacted me most. It really captures the purpose of this organization:
“If you’ve ever seen fireflies, it’s really cool because you have to wait until it’s really dark outside… and you look and there’s just flickers of light everywhere. I thought about it, and finding fireflies is really just about the intentionality of focusing on the light in the foreground, rather than on the darkness that’s in the background. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard childhood stories or just thought about the fireflies, but I feel like every kid has that moment when they’re a child where they want to bottle the firefly up. They want to put it in a jar and share it with someone else. They want to show them what they saw, because the other thing that happens with fireflies is very often when we’re looking for light, sometimes we see it and someone else doesn’t. One kid may say “did you see that, there’s a firefly that flickered over there” and another, “No, I didn’t.” So there’s this concept that if hope is consistently coming, if it’s something that we’re all waiting on but it’s consistently coming, then it is super crucial that when we see it we grab onto it. That we bottle it up, and that we have this intention to share it. Hope is ready to be received but it is also ready to be given. Let us be hope bearers for those that need to borrow hope.”