New light - Thoughts under the stars

 The clock nears 2 a.m. I cannot see the stars, but I know they are above the clouds, each one singing its song in the symphony of the Universe.

Free image "Milky Way" by Pexels at Pixabay. 

I sit alone at my computer with only the sound of the refrigerator behind me and the peeping frogs of tinnitus pulsating in my right ear to break the silence. 

The dog, confused at my early emergence from my cocoon of blankets, watches me sleepily from the hallway. 

An open cookbook is to my left, a reminder that I will try that recipe for English muffins when I eventually start the day; hopefully I will have slept before that. To my right is a shiny white mug that I use to encourage myself to drink more water. 

I notice these things but I attend to my writing, to calm my racing thoughts. This happens occasionally, these bouts of insomnia that I have learned to accept and do something else until I feel tired enough to go back to bed.

My thoughts turn to the sleeping ones in my house. The cats of course - they sleep over 18 hours a day - and my husband down the hall, oblivious to my insomnia, snoring softly. I hear him whistle occasionally in his sleep, pent-up breath escaping like a distant boiling kettle. I imagine what it must be like to breathe all the time through half-congested nostrils. To have to choose between breathing and eating, for only one can be done at a time; his allergies make him miss so much of what others ... what I ... take for granted. I shudder.

My daughter stops by and checks on me. I explain my insomnia (or what I think caused it this time) and she brings me a heating pad for my aching belly - in this body I pay for every pleasure, it seems, with pain - this time it was a prolonged belly-laugh earlier this evening at some silly thing that happened. She and I understand each other's pains. She's a good person, one I am honoured to call my friend as well as my child. She goes back to her bedroom and wishes me a good night. The heating pad helps. Or was it just her love and care for me? Perhaps both. Definitely the love.

And in this relative silence, I sit and type out my thoughts. Blogging relaxes me; it gives me an outlet and orders my thought process so that it doesn't race along, pinging off the walls of my mind like some freshly-released pinball. Yet the thoughts this time are not regrets or flashbacks - those rip at my soul, but not tonight.

Tonight I am ... grateful, pensive, even (dare I say it?) happy. I am unaccustomed to this new way of being. The change came just this morning when I was watching old reruns of The Big Bang Theory. It was near the end of the series and Leonard, who grew up in a loveless home, realizes his mother is using him again to further her career, as she did when he was a child and all through his growing-up years. 

He becomes very angry ... and she gaslights him, ignores him until (she says) his tantrum is done. At the end, he finally decides to forgive her, and comes to tell her so. She hadn't asked for his forgiveness, and told him that. But he forgave her anyway. And his words (paraphrased below) pierced my soul to the quick. "I forgive you because ... I'm just going to have to accept you the way you are, and realize that you will never change. And maybe someday, you will learn to accept me the way I am."  She sits in silence for several seconds, and says, "That feels good. To be forgiven even though I didn't ask you to do it."  He is silent. And she gets up and for the first time in his life, she hugs him. And he hugs her back. No questions, no conditions, no ground rules, Just one simple act of kindness. 

And yes, I cried.

Free image by
Evgeni Tcherkasski at Pixabay.com

The scene reminded me that there are certain people in my life who need forgiveness and who will never change. And maybe it doesn't matter if they do. They need it anyway. And more than that, I need to give it to them. No questions, no conditions, no ground rules. Just one simple act of kindness, repeated over and over and over again, until the healing is complete.

I said to someone earlier this week that miracles happen every day. And a miracle is no less a miracle if it happens slowly and gradually. Just like my little light here that I shine is no less amazing than that of the stars that seem so dim but are really enormous and magnificent. That there even IS light is amazing. And just because I cannot shine as brightly as the sun (or as brightly as other people whom I admire) doesn't mean that I should stop shining my own light, or that I should even dim it. It could be that somebody, somewhere, might be just as inspired as I am by what little light I can shed.

I think I can go back to bed now.

Whether I sleep ... is immaterial. 

Light my Candle

One of the things we do every Christmas Eve as a family is go to the Christmas Eve service at our church.  It's a candlelight service.  Every person over the age of about 10 is given a candle ... unlit ... with a cardboard ring under it to catch the wax.

At the end of the service, a single candle which has been burning throughout the carol sing, is used to light the candles of the people on the end of each pew.  That person lights the next person's candle, and so on.

Our kids love to go to this.  They sing the carols with gusto and their favorite part is the candle-lighting part... the pastor says a few words of inspiration and then we all sing "Silent Night" as someone plays the piano or a guitar.  After that, our family goes out looking at Christmas lights in the city, and after that, we all traipse home and sing Christmas carols around the tree, and we have hot chocolate and maybe watch Christmas specials until it's time to go to bed.

I love watching the flame on a candle. Even when I was a child, I'd watch the single tongue of fire piercing the darkness when the power would go out in the evening during a winter storm.  I'd lose myself in its subtle variances of colour and strength, watch how it danced and in so doing, invited the shadows to dance with it.  It drew me, like some indescribable force telling me that it represented purity, passion, power. Calling me to something more, to something higher.  Still does.


I remember a candlelight service I attended once many years ago in a little country church.  There might have been about fifty people there, maybe less.  Everyone had their candles, unlit.  The pastor asked us to move with our candles to the outside of the room and make a circle all around the edge of the sanctuary.  Once we were in place, he had someone turn off the lights, revealing only one candle burning at the front of the church. Then he lit the first person's candle on either side of him, and we lit each other's candles until everyone's was burning. 

The pastor started by saying, "I'm not going to speak very many words tonight.  All I will say is that God has given each one of us who believes in Jesus a light inside.  He has reached into the darkness in each of us ... and lit our candles.  Now, since these candles we've just lit tonight represent that light in each of us, and God in our lives, I would like you to try a little experiment with me to see what happens."  

We all looked at him quizzically. 

"Please take your candles, and keeping them upright, slowly lower them down as low as you can get them without bending or squatting."  We did.  The light level in the room diminished significantly. "What just happened?" he said, and we told him it got darker. He nodded.  "Now, just as slowly, I want you to lift them up again, and keep going until they are as high as you can get them."  We did, and we saw the light grow in the room until it was twice as bright as when they were in front of us at chest level.  

"I think you get the point of my sermon," he said softly.


We did.
 

Just Be

There is a well known gospel song called The Lighthouse. It talks about Jesus being the lighthouse that rescued the author from the rocks of sin.

Might I suggest that we as Christians are called to be lighthouses too?? The light we shine can point the way to safety - the safety that is in Jesus.

But before we get all hyped up thinking that we have to do the rescuing - let's think about what lighthouses are. I'm talking about manned lighthouses here, the kind we grew up thinking about. They are tall buildings, only wide enough for one person to live. They are located on the edge of the most dangerous shoals, constantly in sight of the rocks that easily could sink a ship. And in themselves, there is absolutely no ability to save those ships.

The saving power comes from the light that's inside.

That light is huge. It is much larger than could ever be useful just to light one building. It is in the uppermost place in the lighthouse. It is so powerful that its candle-power fills the compartment it is housed in, and spills out through the windows to the surrounding waves ... for miles.

The keeper of the lighthouse has two jobs. The first is to make sure that the light is on at all times, even in good weather. The second is to make sure that the windows where the light shines from are completely transparent at all times, so that the light will travel the absolute farthest that it can when it's needed most.

I don't need to draw a diagram here. Our calling as Christians is to make sure the light is on - to let it shine, in other words, and to make sure that there is nothing that hinders His light from shining its brightest. We take care of our responsibility by keeping ourselves in fit spiritual condition, by staying close to God, making sure that there's nothing between us and Him. That comes from being honest with Him and with ourselves. We can even make mistakes. As long as we don't try to hide them, God can even use our mistakes for His glory.

We leave all the results (those rescued by heeding the light, as well as those who see the light and ignore it - to their own hurt) up to the Light of the world - the presence and power of Jesus shining through our lives. To do this, we don't need to DO anything. We just ARE. We ARE ...for Him. Out of that relationship with Him, out of that intimacy with the Almighty, comes an integrity of spirit, an honesty of heart, that is compelling. Truth, transparency, and trust are powerful.

If we could just BE!!

BE - live our lives - toward Him. Give His presence, His love, His power, His mercy, the highest place in our lives - and be ourselves (in Him) before a world that's watching. They can tell a fake a mile away. And they won't be able to see even the strongest light that is masked and dirtied up by hypocrisy and pride blocking its path.
We get so distracted by our "doing." There are lots of people out there "doing." That's all the reward they're going to get - individuals who get on TV or who get some other kind of recognition for the good deeds they do. There's not a whole lot of folks out there "being." "Being" a prayer to God. Not trundling off on this project or that program, "doing." Doing without being produces only one thing: burnout.

Jesus said that when we (truly) believed in Him, out of our innermost BEING would flow rivers of living water. Rivers of gratitude, of love, of joy, of peace, spilling out of our lives and producing the kind of "doing" that is authentic, based on relationship and not duty.

Let's just be - and let His glorious light shine through...