“Light”

As I’ve been studying the book of 1 John this month, light has been on my mind much; and also this month, through some work we’ve been having done on our home, light has been brought to life for me quite literally (via a walk-in closet).  We have such a closet off the side of our master bathroom, and in said closet there had not been a functional light for a long time–until this week when my husband, along with our carpenter friend, finally fixed it.  And while I was indeed thrilled, I’ve realized in the last day or two that I haven’t really even been turning that light on because I’d grown so accustomed to life without it.   And this realization, like all else down here in this realm, eventually did lead me straight back to Jesus.

The fact that I had not really allowed my new closet light to illumine that dark clothes hole has reminded me all over again that I must choose to have an active role in the relationship I have with God through his and my Christ; because choosing to live as if, for a mere moment in time, I knew Jesus was present and real and able to light up the darkness around me is simply not enough, if I desire to live with the peace God talks about in his Scripture–that peace which truly surpasses all understanding.  I must choose to continue, moment by moment, to believe in his presence and in the reality of him and his light–to believe in Christ as God’s light incarnate.  I must choose to remember the Light is indeed there.

Yes, a switch of sorts was flipped when belief in the risen Christ came alive within us.  And everything that has ever happened to us in our lives, from the most tragic to the most beautiful, has worked together to bring us to the moment when we said “yes” to him.  And ever since we did, we’ve been called from flesh to spirit, from darkness to light, from this world to that other world which does indeed linger more closely to us here than most of us even dare to imagine.  But, if we’re really honest about it, light, depending upon where we are, can be scary.  It can be scary because it does, after all, reveal all kinds of things we don’t want others to see, which is probably why I’ve always preferred lamps to overhead lights (since I don’t want others to get a full view of the dust and dog hair on my hardwoods).

But, light also serves to reveal beauty all around us (like the grain in the wood under the dust/dog hair).  And any of us who’s lived for very long at all knows already that we just don’t get the luxury of any beauty down here in this realm without some dirt to go along with it.  We can be sure though that every single bit of the beauty in this world and in each other that we’ve ever been awed by can be traced right back to God.  There is no other source.  In 1 John we’re told that God is light and in him is no darkness at all–and Jesus brought this reality of God to life in the very flesh he embodied, through the “real” life he chose to live down here.  Jesus is our light, is THE Light–and there simply isn’t any light apart from him.

As we are told in both the Old and the New Testaments (Isaiah 9:2 and Matthew 4:16), “…..the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”