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December in the city: reflecting on light.

The cold had me cycling quickly through the city this evening coming back from a lovely meeting with a dear friend at the “Brecht café” (interestingly named after the German author “Bertolt Brecht” whose literature I was studying and analyzing when I did German in school, many many years ago).  Yet, even though I was trying to get inside as quickly as possible, I still took in the many amazing light features popping up around the city in preparation for the festival of lights. It is beautiful. Massive chandeliers made up of many little lights along the wide roads, and different creative uses of lights on buildings, really makes the city illuminated (literally). As I crossed the Dam square, the Christmas tree was also up and alight.

I started thinking about the film I watched in the cinema today, “The Butler”. It was a great film, not really about light per se, more about USA and their racial history, but a quote at the start of the film stood out to me and remains with me. Martin Luther King once said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that.” The Bible talks about light coming into darkness, and the darkness not overcoming it. And so I was starting to think about that, and how it is so easy to get discouraged by all the darkness that seems to be taking over the earth. All the bad things that are happening, and not even counting the natural disasters, but the things  done by people to other people. And yet, in the midst of seeing such deep darkness, there is hope, and the hope is in the Light who is Jesus. And so there is a choice- I can either let darkness overwhelm me or I can choose to walk gazing on Jesus who is the light that can drive out darkness.

And then I was thinking about darkness not so much with regards to evil, but related to hard times in life; to the “the valleys of the shadow of death” times .  And I was reminded by an email I got today about how Job (to say his life was hard is an understatement) declared: “By His light I walked through darkness!”

I want to hold on to this revelation of the power of Light to drive out not only the darkness  in the world, but also lead me through dark times in my own life. And as I do, I desire to bring this same  hope to those who can’t see it yet in their lives and situations.

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