City Lights

"Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." ~Matthew 5:16

Sitting in the dimly-lit airplane, surrounded by a noise that hovers between a hum and a roar, and soaring some 10,000-15,000 feet above the ground is something I don’t get to do very often. I am really not sure how long it has been since I have flown at night, but it has been long enough that I didn’t remember how magical it could be.

As we took off, I peered out the window. First the lights flashed by slowly, and then with increasing speed. We lifted off the ground, and the landscape of Tulsa, Okla. materialized in the darkness. Houses and businesses were followed by neighborhoods, parts of town, and eventually whole cities. I could see Christmas lights on peoples’ houses. The speed was exhilarating, the perspective was novel, and the twinkling lights were gorgeous.

The sheer magnitude of the world was overwhelming and I began to reflect on how small I was. I was one little girl sitting on an airplane full of hundreds of people headed to St. Louis and beyond. I am only one. How much can I do in a sea of people?  I just blend in. Each person on this one plane had his or her own stresses, joys, frustrations, journeys, and adventures ahead.

 I looked ahead at the light reflecting off the pages of the book the woman behind me is reading onto her face. Beside me a man’s face glows from the light of his IPhone. Each light illuminated the exhaustion, cares, boredom, and anticipation in each his or her face.

Below on the ground, each light also represented a human, a family, a business, a destination. Porch-lights cast a pool of light in front of houses. Brightly-colored signs indicated businesses, and I chuckled that I could pick out a Walgreens from hundreds of feet in the air. Headlights and streetlights enabled countless people to navigate their way through the evening traffic. If one of the many people looked up, they might notice the blinking red and white lights or sense the roar of a Southwest airplane.

The lights on the ground and in the air reminded me of the candlelight service at John Brown University last weekend. While one candle or bulb may seem insignificant, when combined with hundreds or thousands of others it is remarkable how bright a light those combined small beacons can produce.

This multiplying effect became even more evident to me further in the evening when I saw the city lights of Saint Louis, Miss. and Chicago, Ill. Each was a successively larger city than Tulsa, and the combined power of all the city lights was noticeable. I could see St. Louis’ lights through the clouds that blanketed the sky during out decent. Their intensity created dim orange blotches across the grey-covered sky below. Later, as we took off from Chicago, the rows and squares of lights seemed to go on forever. What power those little lights had! They lit up the whole night sky.

You and I are like little lights, too. We are dim when isolated by ourselves. But when combined with many, many other lights, we have great power. Not only are we powerful, but we are gorgeous. We are beautiful and mighty.

Reader, it is hard to be a light burning by oneself. Going home to celebrate Christmas with your family may be an opportunity to be surrounded by other beacons of faith, or it may be lonely. Whatever the case may be, I encourage you to burn brightly. Be a beacon, a city on a hill that cannot be hidden, a lamp on a stand, or a light seen from thousands of feet above the ground.

Shine brightly.