Light and Darkness
This morning I came to Ephesians 5 in my devotions. I've read this passage many times before but something struck me differently this morning. Verse 8 especially.
For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light.
I read that verse as I looked out on a very foggy morning and saw the streetlights shining through the fog outside our front window. As I walked in to church an hour or so later, it was still dark and part of the sidewalk that I walked has something about it on dark foggy mornings. Something about where the streetlights are on that path just catch me every time a morning like this comes around. There's something about the way that the two streetlights on this path illumine just enough but not completely. That's how I feel about what it means to live as children of light. We live as children of light as we walk in the "just enough" light that we receive for our lives of faith. God doesn't reveal the whole of the path ahead of us but I find that we see just enough to take one step and then another and then another. Yes, there is darkness but there is well enough just enough light to keep walking.
As my family and I enter into the time of transition ahead as I leave the church and move on to a new field of ministry, it feels like there's a lot of unknown ahead of us. I don't want to say that it is darkness ahead because that feels that there's something sinister coming. I don't see that and I don't feel that. But instead I feel like this path - that there is just enough light to know where the path lies ahead and to know that the light illumines our way.
But there was a surprising thing in this picture I took this morning. The bench. When I took this shot this morning, I was just trying to capture the pattern of the light. I did not anticipate the bench being illumined in the darkness. What I feel with that is that the Lord is also providing a space of rest and renewal as the path continues. We aren't sure where it is leading but we know that the Lord is leading, the Lord provides some space for rest, and the light is there.
For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light.