“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Martin Luther King Jr.
It has always struck me as almost a waste that God makes so very many of something. Profusions of stars that remain undiscovered, innumerable people who will never be “known,” pastures and pastures of wildflowers, most of which are never seen or appreciated by a single human eye. He’s so extravagant, isn’t He?
A Tiny Beauty
And in the face of all that excess, I often feel pointedly insignificant. What possible purpose could we have for being here? Aren’t we really like a single wildflower, one of a gazillion others, here today, gone tomorrow, just like Jesus said?
I pick wildflowers when they’re in bloom. I love welcoming a bit of that profusion and freshness into my home, but I always shudder that my small handful does not make a dent in the pastures that remain, for it reminds me that if I weren’t here, there would be others to take my place.
This occupies a lot of my time, contemplating the position and purpose of things in the millennial meadow. I know it is silly, but somehow I see myself as simply one of the innumerable souls God has brought forth and sprouted, blooming silently in the single pasture of time, nodding peacefully and sitting prettily next to you until I’m gone.
Although I know with some inherent “amen” that I am “worth far more than these” (Matt. 6:26-34), flowers fade quickly, their fragile beatitude unable to resist the inexorability of winter, just as I will. What possible contribution could a single wildflower make?
A Tiny Light
It is not until wintertide, when all the flowers have bowed their heads for the last time, that stars take up their hymn of infinitude and teach me the significance of the solitary. It is so like God to leave us a prolific witness in the dark, cold death of winter.
There’s something about midnight clarity, scrubbed clean of any sound and wrapped in winter’s frozen blanket, that reveals God. I am struck by the darkness of it, by how very far the smallest lights can be seen at midnight and how millions of them combine in a swirl of stardust overhead.
My son received a telescope for Christmas this year, and as our family took turns probing the frigid darkness, I was breathless at the vast spread before me. A single star, light years away, pierces the black sky and leaves a pinpoint of light. All those pinpoints together, strewn across the vastness of the cosmos, make up the pasture of our Milky Way.
Under a profusion of tiny star-dots I wondered at the many millions of years it took their light to reach me. Each single light, if extinguished, would be immediately swallowed up in the surrounding darkness, and as that thought occurred to me, I understood something of the deliberation of God’s message in overwhelming us with incalculable numbers.
While it communicates something of His infinity, it also enshrouds and whispers each ones’ supreme dignity, for where there is a flower, there is beauty. Where there is a star, there is light.
When He finally reveals Himself to be the mysterious force that guides all things to their proper end, will I have accomplished the thing for which He sent me? Will the position I occupied in history be one of light and flower? Surely we must shine faithfully on our neighbors, so that Light can dawn on those who sit in darkness and shadow of death, otherwise they are overwhelmed and sucked into its void.
We are invited, you and I, to radiate spiritual beauty and light in this dark, somber world that “breathes unbelief.” “[F]or once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light” (Eph. 5:8). If we persist in this sublime task until the end, the spiritual space around us, although seemingly small and maybe truly so in the scheme of millennia, plants a permanent light and beauty in history that beats back the encroaching darkness of sin and death and testifies to the beautiful plenitude of God. What must all those circles of light, nestled against one another throughout the vast expanse of time “look” like?
One silent night the Light of the World entered our darkness and sin, and a faithful star split it open to reveal Him and make it holy. It is the same with us, so that the Spirit and holiness of God shines on us and through us to our neighbor. That “light is the life of men.” Although surrounded with darkness as the stars in the night sky, we rest in light and cast it forth to others who “sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide [their] feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79).
The thought that I, grace be to God, may win a tiny place of beauty and light in space and time for God inspires me to simply and faithfully shine where I am placed, to trust that although my spot is small, it can be seen by those who are searching from the farthest reaches of the universe.