Blessings Theme Logo
The Blessings logo will unify all of the Burnsland website posts that fall under the Blessings 2025 theme.
As with the Love One Another theme from 2024, once I figured out a theme, I wanted a logo to lead back to the main Blessings page to make everything easy to find.
Bendiciones
You may be wondering, “Why ‘bendiciones’?” But there is a reason for that.
As you may recall, Laura and I went to Panama in 2024 with a church group. On the Sunday that we were there, after the church service, many people came up to us and greeted us by saying, “Bendiciones.” They would also say it to their fellow Panamanians, not just to us Americans.
A quick visit to Google Translate told us that they were saying, “Blessings.” That could be taken a few ways. I believe they were wishing God’s blessings on us. But I also thought about how much of a blessing it was for us to be there, and how much of a blessing the people of the church there were to us. I thought about the blessings of the trip, from safe travel, to a good group to travel with, to the ability to go, to all of the things that we got to experience while we were there. Trips like that are always supposed to be a blessing to the people that you are going to serve, but those who go always end up feeling blessed as well.
Even though that was in October and there were still two and a half months left in the year, I had already been thinking about what the Burnsland theme for 2025 might be. Once we were there, I knew that “Blessings” would be a good theme. We are all abundantly blessed, but we often need reminders of that fact. So why not have that as the theme? And why not have (for me) a reminder of that Panama trip that inspired the theme, too?
To me, God’s blessings are like the sun, always shining, always there. Sometimes we have to look through the clouds, but the sun is always there. Even when we turn away from it in the night, the sun does not stop shining. And God does not stop blessing us. Because of that, I included the sun in the logo.
And just for fun, I decided to make it look like a sticker, with a paper texture and a little bit of shadow underneath it. As if it is a sticker that I stuck on all of those Blessings posts.
So there you have it. As we go through 2025, think about how blessed you are, and remember where all of those blessings come from.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. - James 1:17 ESV

About the Artwork
I had been using Adobe Fresco for all my recent art. But for this one, I went back to Clip Studio Paint. I knew how to do arc-aligned text in Clip Studio Paint, and that was the look that I wanted for this, instead of the hand-lettered look that I used for the Love One Another logo.
I had originally planned to just have the words and the sun with no background, to help it blend in on whatever page it was on. However, toward the end I came up with the idea to make it look like a sticker, giving it a blue background and a paper texture, and the shadow underneath.
