The darkness that appears to be gathering on and hovering over the earth can tempt us to fear or lament, but if we are God’s children and He resides in us that is not what He is calling us to right now. The darkness is not to be our focus because we were made to shine.

If Jesus resides within us, then light resides in us. The gathering darkness should cause our light to be that much brighter as the dimmer manmade lights are overcome by shadow. We were called to be light, and life and He would desire to call that forth in us in ways only He can.

Sometimes we forget that despite how important our words are, who we are because of Him and how He shines through us should eclipse anything else.

Jesus said we are to be salt and light. If we are that, then we will not be pulled off into tangents of the day, cultural dustups, popular arguments, and causes. Those will only distract us from the culture that matters – His! It will also cause others to focus more on our words and views than the light that resides in us and the world has never needed that light more.

Scripture makes clear that as the day of His return comes closer, the world will become darker and things we would not have imagined will become the norm. Polarization will tear apart families, churches, neighborhoods, and nations, but that is when He most needs us, you, and I, to be set apart and to shine.

Imagine yourself in a jewelry store. How often are the jewels and diamonds there displayed on black or dark blue velvet when the jeweler wants to encourage you to buy some of his most beautiful pieces? That is especially true if you are looking at loose diamonds to select for a special ring or necklace. That dark background makes the beauty and light in the diamonds shine more brightly

“Brilliance requires darkness.”

Kenny Luck

I think the apostle Paul knew that as well. Consider his words:

“Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life. And then I will be able to boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor in vain.”

Philippians 2:14-16 (NIV)

The stars in the sky twinkle and gleam even though they are thousands and thousands of miles away because they are scattered across the dark night sky.

We are His workmanship. If the Lord has not yet returned, then we are to shine ever more brightly in the darkening world so that others might yet see and discover His grace, truth, and love before it is too late.

Cutting away the parts that detract from the beauty of His light within us so we can shine more beautifully is His work of sanctification. Diamonds are cut and shaped so the many facets of the gem can better reflect the light and fire from within the gem. And so, it is with us…or should be.

“In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”   

Matthew 5:16 (NIV)

“And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts,”   

2 Peter 1:19 (ESV)

We have been given His light so much as Tolkien says in The Lord of the Rings:

“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

I wonder if when God looks upon the earth, He hopes to see lights in each of us scattered around the globe much as we see the stars scattered across the sky.

You were made to shine.

Late spring or early summer walks give me a chance to see things coming alive again after the long winter months. Little by little trees begin to show green on the dead looking branches and spring flowers take turns surprising me with their colors if I am observant. By the beginning of June, I can tell which shrubs, bushes, and perennials have weathered the winter months well but some of our rose bushes are still a bit slow to show us. It’s not always clear if something is alive or dead.

Whether a relationship is thriving, or dead can also be hard to determine many times. Too often we are good at feigning the state of a relationship to avoid the truth of its condition or avoid hard questions from others who observe us. We can get so used to doing it that we barely notice. But there is something amiss if that is true.

If any relationship is alive there will be “life” in it. It will show the evidence of that in more than one or two ways. You know a relationship is current by the actions, energy, body language, tone of voice, and more. It will not be perfect, and it will also not be static.

Grape vines in our area look like they are alive at the present time, but it will be hard to tell for many weeks whether there will be grapes showing up. They are not “in season” until very late summer and the size or quality of the fruit will still be in question for some weeks and months except to the knowledgeable vinedresser and vintner. It always reminds me to be careful when I am looking for fruit in a relationship or the life of another person pursuing Christ. Perhaps there has been significant pruning and the vines will rest longer before they show the benefits of this cutting away of both dead and living vines so they will produce more fruit.

I began to consider this a bit more as I was reading about what the book of Revelation says about the church at Sardis – having a reputation of being alive but dead. What did that mean or look like? Could it be true of us today?

“It was dead because it excluded the everyday world. It gave an impression of vigor … but the sharp line it drew between everyday life and holy-day life…”

Eugene Peterson in This Hallelujah Banquet

They appear to have restricted holiness or the holy life to their times together in church versus seeing how He moves throughout the everyday life and situations we face. If we look at the life of Christ it seems evident that He did not intend that our relationship with Him be confined to a worship service (no matter how energetic it might appear).

I think the challenge for us is what does our faith and belief look like Monday through Saturday, not because we are carrying around a Bible and sharing scripture verses with any and all we meet but rather because our convictions and commitment is a lived truth. No matter we are picking up coffee at our favorite coffee shop, working at our job, grocery shopping, or participating in a committee meeting, do we look like we bear Christ’s image in how we respond, how we love, and how we make decisions? Is his Holy Spirit active and alive within us then? Do we nurture intimacy with Him when we are not in worship services or formalized ministry activities?

“If God has spirit, then God is not simply an idea or an abstraction. It is popular to say that God is an idea of beauty or of love or of truth. Whatever is beautiful or lovely or truthful is God. That is a nice sentiment but poor theology. God is personal and deeply alive.”

Eugene Peterson in This Hallelujah Banquet

Have we forgotten that God, Jesus, is a person?

“If God has spirit, he cannot be dealt with as an object. He must be confronted as a person. A living, personal being demands relationship. I can arrange books, rooms, clothing, and even work, but I must live with persons. They resist being put in their place. They refuse to be arranged and manipulated. They must be talked to. There must be an exchange of feelings with them. I have heard the phrase “We must leave a place for God in our lives.” This is a nice idea if it would work, but it won’t, because God has spirit. He will not be confined to a place. He is a living being with whom we must live. This is part of what it means to say that God has spirit. It means fundamentally that we have the perfection of a living God in our midst.”

Eugene Peterson in This Hallelujah Banquet

If we have accepted Christ, his spirit is alive and active in us and if we try to confine his involvement to our worship services we will be more like the church at Sardis. They considered themselves to be church members because they continued to come to worship but ceased being actively full of life in every aspect of daily life.

God wants a vibrant relationship with us whether we are seated in a pew or at a ballgame, attending a concert or sitting at the bedside of someone who is ill. If that happens our lives will be fruitful.

“The world is one single whole. It’s holy. We divide it into areas marked out for God and areas marked out for ourselves. We call churches sacred and playgrounds secular. We have places where we pray and others where we play. But our compartments desecrate the way things are supposed to be; the earth is the Lord’s.”

Eugene Peterson in This Hallelujah Banquet

We live one nanosecond at a time with little awareness one after another nanoseconds pass by and add into minutes that become the present. But how hard is it to really live in that present moment? We are surrounded by devices that pull us forward beyond this nanosecond and memories and consequences of other nanoseconds that pull us backward. Living in the present moment is not as easy as it sounds even though we live one moment at a time.

“To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.”

Walker Percy

God created time when He created the universe, hung the sun, moon, and stars in place while also mystifying us by telling us his name, I AM. His name reminding us of his presence continuously with us. Finite minds can give assent and yet not fully grasp the reality. We, his creation with finite minds, live within the confines of time. And often we war with it, wanting it to slow down or move faster and being incapable of adjusting its course.

I wonder if that is what feeds our desire to know what will happen next in this life as well as the next. The passage of time reminds us that we are not in control of nearly as many things as we might wish while yet given choice about how we spend it.

Add to this that we live in two worlds at once, the seen and the unseen. The unseen creates curiosity as well as anxiety because we accept it is there while not knowing a great deal about it. The unseen spiritual world is the big picture in which the material world is set, the canvas upon which God chooses to tell us about himself and us. And what a canvas it is!

“Our existence is framed in matter. Nothing in the gospel is presented apart from the physical, nor can it be understood or received apart from the physical. That is not to say that there is nothing but matter, for that would deny most of what living by faith asserts. But it does mean that nothing can be experienced apart from matter. The great invisibles, God and the soul, are incomprehensible apart from the great visible, heaven and earth. “

Eugene Peterson in Reversed Thunder

Because we are matter and live in the confines of physical space, time, and matter, it can be easy for us to lose track of the unseen world we live in as well and scripture reminds us not to lose sight of the difference or importance of the unseen world.

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV)

Paul challenges the believers in Corinth and us that where the big things are really happening is in the unseen world where God is working and as we tune our ears and eyes to become more alert, we get glimpses of what is doing in his workplace – creation, heaven, and earth. That’s where the biggest headlines are being written as we watch the material world teetering and decaying.

All these things can get us caught up in trying to know more about what lays ahead and we can get lost in books that try to forecast when the end of all things will come and what it will look like. Some try to excise every word and line in the Revelation trying to decipher the messages in the visions and the significance in the numbers and miss the big picture that the book is John outlining what he heard from Jesus and telling us one last time who He is, who God is, and inviting us to where we are meant to be – worshipping Him. Scripture teaches us that He is the beginning and the end, and I don’t think his desire is for us to get lost in the details.

“When Jesus promised his return, he did not intend to scare us out of our wits, or license a guild of prophets who would earn a comfortable living by making book on the time. He placed himself firmly ahead of us, as end, just as he had established himself at the beginning…If we cannot join our beginning to our end, we will live scattered and incoherent lives. The expectation of Jesus’ coming provides a goal that shapes and unifies life in accordance with its origins in Christ, in patterns that are consonant with its completion in Christ. This urgency is liberating, for it compels us to stay awake, deeply and earnestly aware of who we are and what we are doing, keeping us free from trivia, that, like the threads of the Lilliputians, can make prisoners of us effectively as any ball and chain.”

Eugene Peterson in Reversed Thunder

It is key to remember that two words are used for time in scripture and John in the Revelation uses both of them – chronos that we know well and is measured by clocks and calendars and kairos which connotes the unseen faith, the anticipation that is not limited by clocks and calendars.

The risk we face is that our senses of Him working in the unseen world become dull as time (as we know it) moves forward. It is that which will muffle the sound of his voice and dim the things He would have us see each day. God first created light because He would not have us walk in the darkness and perhaps to also remind us that his light, Christ’s light, conquered and is and will conquer darkness.

Before the first lighthouse was built, beacon fires were lit as we see in the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as in the stories and movies for “The Lord of the Rings”. It would be in Alexandria that the first lighthouse would be built. Known as Pharos of Alexandria, this first lighthouse stood 350 feet high.

The Romans would go on to build many more as their empire expanded far beyond Rome. A fragment of a Roman lighthouse still exists in Dover, England.

Century by century modernization of lighthouses occurred to the present day, lighting the way for those out to sea, serving a vital purpose.

Long before GPS guided navigation, these sentinels stood at the place where the land and the sea meet, never wavering in their service with the faithful men and women who kept the beacons lit.

I have visited lighthouses along the east coast of the United States while on various vacations. Some of my favorites mark the beautiful coast of Maine. Each lighthouse appears unique in its design and the terrain on which it stands. My favorites include Bass Harbor Lighthouse, the Cape Neddick Light, and Pemaquid Point Lighthouse in Maine.

If all the stories linked to each lighthouse were compiled into books, I wonder how many volumes there would be and how many shelves would be needed to hold them.

Reading in Lisa Wingate’s marvelous book, The Prayer Box, set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina brought back memories of lighthouses we visited there and reminded me once again that we, you and I, are called to be light (perhaps lighthouses) for those lost at sea.

The description Lisa Wingate pens in The Prayer Box reminds me of important truths:

“What does a lighthouse do? I ask myself. It never moves. It cannot hike up its rocky skirt and dash into the ocean to rescue a foundering ship. It cannot calm the waters or clear the shoals. It can only cast light into the darkness. It can only point the way. Yet, through one lighthouse, you guide many ships.”

What clarity these words bring to those we find in Matthew 5:14-16 (NIV):

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. ¹⁵ Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. ¹⁶ In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

The lighthouse isn’t rushing about from one place to another. It stands consistently where its designer places it and its light points the way. Those at sea are the ones that must move to avoid disaster and destruction.

To be a lighthouse is to keep the light burning even if we do not see beyond the place we stand. To be a lighthouse is to know the singular call to provide light when darkness, dense fog, and storms would seek to shroud the light. To be a lighthouse is to draw attention to the light within it rather than the lighthouse.

How simply these truths remind us of what it means to be called by Jesus to be light, but how clearly they also underscore the need for light to be ever emanating from our lives. We never know when someone lost in darkness may be hoping to glimpse even the smallest light to give direction and hope.

Near the end of his earthly ministry Jesus told his disciples a parable about how vital it is to keep the light (the oil) in our lamp from running out, from going dark. The parable in Matthew 25 speaks of wise virgins whose lamps are filled and lit, but also warns of foolish virgins whose lamps have gone dark.

Tending the light within us is not a casual admonition.

Let us not forget that even though we may not see those who are searching for a light, we are called to be a lighthouse consistently allowing HIS  light to shine so He can be seen.

“Yet, through one lighthouse, you guide many ships.”

Lisa Wingate

Today I share a repeat post because the purpose of pausing to consider the cost of freedom doesn’t end.

Today in the United States we pause to celebrate Memorial Day.

Most will celebrate it with picnics, boating, ball games, swimming, family, and friends. A few will pause for those remaining public celebrations to commemorate the day. Fewer still will visit the graves of those fallen for the sake of freedom or know when this commemoration began or the cost for those who gave us the freedom to celebrate it.

Originally it was called Decoration Day and that is the name I recall when I was a young child. Its purpose? To provide a day of remembrance for those who have died in service of the United States of America.

It was born out of the United States Civil War and a desire to honor our dead. General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, proclaimed the day officially on May 5, 1868, and asked that the 30^th of May 1868 be designated for the purpose of strewing the graves of those who had died in the defense of their country with flowers and flags.

Most of us would not recall that Memorial Day began with that bloodiest of all United States wars. The country would be torn in two with the Union of the North raising an army of 2,128,948 and the Confederacy of the South mustering a total of 1,082,119 troops. It was a war that would be fought in thousands of places from southern Pennsylvania to Texas, from New Mexico to Florida with most of the battles fought in Virginia and Tennessee.

Between April 12, 1861, when Fort Sumter, South Carolina, was fired upon until April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the McLean House in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, 620,000 would die for the cause they believed in. They would die from combat, accident, starvation, and disease. Of that number, the three-day battle on the fields around Gettysburg, PA, in 1863, would see the largest number fall. A total of 51,000 would be dead by the end of the battle.

It can be easy to forget how significant the losses were during the Civil War. Yet, our love for freedom would stir the hearts of others to serve in battles far from our own coastline. In World War II 405,399 would give their lives following the brutal conditions faced during World War I when 116,516 would fall in battle.

Of course, these would not be the only battles where men and women would give their lives for the cause of freedom. In Vietnam we would sacrifice 58,209 and in Korea we would lose 36, 516.

To establish this nation, 25,000 would die in the Revolutionary War. Another 20,000 would die in the War of 1812 and 13,283 in the Mexican War. The Spanish-American War would result in a loss of 2,446.

More recently 6,626 would be lost in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan with another 258 falling during the Gulf War.

How much do we value this freedom?

How much do we take it for granted or use it to serve our own ends rather than for the good of our brothers and sisters?

When we speak of a fight for freedom, men, and women, despite their fear or condition, held the value for liberty and the release of tyranny so foremost among their beliefs that they were willing to leave those they loved most to serve those they had never met.

As I took time to visit a small country cemetery in Ohio near where I live, I was struck as I always am by the number of American flags that had been placed on the graves of our veterans. This cemetery is adjacent to a church founded in the 1840’s.

In the oldest part of the cemetery where the gravestones are often not readable, I found flags adorning the graves of two Civil War veterans. One had died in 1865 and another in 1866. I read their names: James Turner and James Shaw. I wondered what they had seen in their time on the battlefield and if their deaths shortly after the war came because of wounds that never healed.

We can never repay the debt we owe to so many.

We can also never repay the debt we owe to the One who came to give us grace and freedom from sin, the One who suffered for us at great expense to purchase what we could not gain without His payment.

During all the fun and celebrating we may do this day, let us not forget to be thankful, to sober our hearts, to give thanks for so many who gave all they had for our sakes. Let us also thank God for His love beyond measure in what He sacrificed for us.

Freedom is never free.

Others will always want to take it from us, to enslave us. Let us remember to cherish it, not abuse it for our own selfish ends, or fail to recognize the responsibility we must uphold and guard it because of the great cost paid to grant it.