The Light In This Room

Rivka set the candlesticks out at four o'clock, the way she had set them out at four o'clock for twenty years. The brass one had been her mother's. The other came from a hardware store on Fulton Street, bought the week the brass one's twin went missing in a move, and it had never matched, and she had stopped minding a long time ago.

She lined them up on the folded dish towel. She glanced at the window to see how much afternoon was left. Then she went back to the sink, because the pot from lunch was still soaking and Friday does not wait for anybody.

Her granddaughter Talia was at the kitchen table with a math worksheet and a pencil she kept chewing. Nine years old, freckles, one sock up and one sock down. Talia had been coming on Fridays since her mother went back to school at night, and she never said much, and she never once asked to go home early.

At twenty past four Rivka dried her hands, struck the match, and lit them. Then she did what she always did afterward, which was to stand still with her hands lifted near her face and think about people. Her son. Talia's mother. The neighbor two floors down whose husband had gone into the hospital on Tuesday. It was not eloquent. It never had been. It was mostly names, and one sentence each.

Then she opened her eyes and looked at the two small flames doubling themselves in the dark of the window, and she thought what she thought most weeks. There it is. That is the light in this room.

She meant the candles.

There was a whole quiet arithmetic behind that, and she had been doing the sum the same way for decades. She had never taught anybody anything. She had never stood at the front of a room. She worked twenty six years in the billing office of a dental practice and retired with a sheet cake and a card signed by eleven people, two of whom spelled her name wrong. When the women in her building talked about somebody who was really a light, they meant the one who ran the food pantry over on Ninth, or the one whose son played piano at the nursing home on Sundays. Rivka understood the shape of that compliment perfectly well and knew it did not fit her. She was the one who lit the candles. The candles did the rest.

Behind her, Talia had stopped chewing the pencil.

She was watching the window too. She was not watching the flames. Nine year olds are terrible at hiding what they are looking at, and what she was looking at, in the reflection, was her grandmother's face lit from underneath, standing there with her eyes closed at twenty past four on a Friday, being the one steady hour in a week that did not have another one.

Talia would not have had words for it. If you had asked her about it in the car afterward, she would have said she liked going to her grandmother's. That is all she would have said, and then she would have asked what was for dinner.

But if you had taken the candles off the counter, she still would have come.

What He said, and who He said it to

The sentence about being the light of the world was not spoken to a room of professionals. It was spoken out of doors, on a hillside, to a crowd of fishermen and farmers and mothers and day laborers, and it was spoken before a single one of them had done anything about it. Nobody in that crowd had a ministry. Nobody had a testimony yet. There was no record of results, because there were no results, because He had only just started talking.

And He did not say become. He said are.

You are the light of the world, and you were that before anybody asked you to prove it. I am not saying that to encourage you. Matthew 5:14 put it in writing over a hillside full of nobodies, and it has stood there without needing anybody's agreement ever since, and the Holy Spirit is what carries a written line like that across two thousand years and sets it down on a kitchen counter at twenty past four.

This matters more than it looks, because the moment a fact becomes an assignment, everything about it changes. A fact you can rest on. An assignment you can fall behind on. And most people who have been in church for any length of time have quietly had that sentence converted for them, from something Jesus announced into something they are late with. They hear it now as a report card. Are you shining. Are you shining enough. Are you shining like the woman who runs the pantry over on Ninth.

That is not what He said, and He is not the one who changed it.

You have a light in you that you did not manufacture and cannot mislay. That is not a compliment about your personality. Scripture puts the whole weight of it on Him: it was God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness who has shined in our hearts, and 2 Corinthians 4:6 is where that is written down. The Spirit does not argue you into believing it. He seats it, quietly, in a person who has assumed otherwise for two decades.

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?Psalm 27:1

The candle was never the source

Notice what a candle actually is. A candle does not make light. A candle holds a flame that came from somewhere else. Somebody struck a match. The wax is a carrier, and it is a good and faithful carrier, and it has exactly no ability to produce a single thing on its own.

That is the whole doctrine, and Rivka stood about six inches from it every Friday for twenty years without ever turning it around and pointing it at herself.

You were lit by Christ, and the lighting is finished. The written word does not put that anywhere in the future. It sits in the perfect tense, done, behind you: He has delivered us and has translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, Colossians 1:13, past action with present result. His Spirit says it again today, in the kitchen you happen to be standing in, to the person who is certain the room is warm because of the wax.

So when the sentence gets handed back to somebody like Rivka, the reflex is immediate and it always sounds humble. It is not me. I have not done anything. The pantry woman, maybe. Not me.

Here is the strange mercy of it. That reflex is half right, and it is right in the half that matters least. It is not you, in the sense that you did not generate it and never could have. It is entirely wrong in the other half, because the light did not stay up in the sky where it was safely general. It landed. It landed on a specific woman with a chipped candlestick and a card signed by eleven people.

You are already the warm hour in somebody's week, and you did not schedule it. That is not a claim about your gifting. Isaiah 60:1 is blunt about where it comes from, the light is come and the glory of the LORD is risen upon you, and the Spirit is agreeing with that written line right now, over you, in the room you happen to be standing in.

Nobody has to be told to warm their hands at a fire. They simply come and stand near it. A nine year old with a math worksheet does not run an evaluation of her grandmother's spiritual output. She keeps showing up on Fridays.