The Same Coat As Everybody Else

Ten past seven on a Monday, and the shelter at the bus stop outside the Fairview laundromat holds six people and has room for four. Marva stands at the open edge of it, half in the drizzle, in the gray wool coat she bought nine winters ago off a sale rack because it went with everything. Everything, it turned out, meant work.

She counts coats. She does it without meaning to, the way some people count steps. Gray, gray, navy, black, gray, and one mustard one on a girl with a folder under her arm. Six coats and a mustard, and Marva's is the third gray from the left, and there is nothing in the whole line of them that would make a passing car slow down.

At fourteen minutes past, the 41 comes around the corner with its windows fogged, and everybody does the small shuffle toward the curb. The girl in the mustard coat is trying to close a backpack with too much in it, and the folder under her arm is sliding, and it is going to go. Marva takes it. She does not decide to take it. She takes it the way you catch a glass going off a counter, and she holds it while the girl fights the zipper, and she hands it back, and the girl says thanks, and they board and sit four rows apart. That is the whole event.

Except the girl is fifteen, her name is Nia, and she had been standing under that shelter for eleven minutes working out whether she could get through the day. What reached her at fourteen minutes past was not the folder. It was that somebody in the line was not in a hurry. Nia could not have told you that. Marva certainly could not.

Marva gets off at Warren and Third and walks the last two blocks thinking the thought she thinks most Mondays, which is that the word light belongs to other people. Not bitterly. As a settled fact she made peace with a long time ago, the way a person makes peace with their height. Light belongs to the woman who prays out loud on Wednesdays and never runs out of words. Light belongs to her cousin Delroy, who can make a room laugh and then make it go quiet, in that order, in about ninety seconds flat. Light belongs to people with something about them.

Marva has nothing about her. She has a gray coat, a badge on a lanyard, a mother who calls on Sundays, and a desk where she reconciles invoices until half past four. She has never once said anything to a stranger about the Lord, not in the way the woman on the radio means it, and every year that passes the word witness sounds a little more like a bill she has not paid.

The rain turns from drizzle into the real thing around nine. And nowhere in the whole of that Monday does it cross Marva's mind that light left the shelter at fourteen minutes past seven, got on the 41, and sat down four rows away from her.

The candle was never asked how bright it was

There is a sentence in Scripture that has been read to you as a job description your whole life, and it was never one. Jesus was sitting on a hillside outside a fishing town, in front of people with dirt under their fingernails and nothing on their record, and He did not tell them to become the light of the world. He told them what they were. Present tense. Statement of fact. Spoken over a crowd who had not yet done a single thing about it, and some of whom never would.

You are the light of the world, and you were that before anybody asked you to prove it. I am not saying it to cheer you up. Jesus said it in Matthew 5:14 to a hillside of nobodies who had brought nothing at all to the meeting, it is written down and it holds without your permission, and what the Holy Spirit adds this morning is that the sentence has your name inside it, third gray coat from the left.

Notice what Jesus does not do next. He does not grade anybody. He does not ask the crowd how brightly they have been burning, or set them a number, or hand out a method. He talks instead about a lamp and a bowl, and the whole of His point is that light behaves like light. Nobody has to coach a candle.

The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.Luke 11:34, 36

Read that last clause slowly. The whole shall be full of light. Not the impressive part of you. Not the part that speaks well on a Wednesday. The whole, which includes the part standing in the drizzle counting coats and finding itself unremarkable.

You have light in you that you did not manufacture and cannot misplace. Luke 11:36 does not describe a candle being scored, it describes a body being full, and the written word puts no dimmer switch in a believer's hand. The Spirit is not waiting for you to feel lit before He agrees with that. He is agreeing with it now, over your desk, over the invoices, over a wet coat on the back of a chair.

Something about them

The idea that light belongs to people with something about them is one of the tidiest lies ever handed to a quiet person, because it arrives dressed as humility. It is not humility. It is a rival theory about the source.

Watch how it works. Delroy can hold a room, so we say Delroy has light. The woman on the radio has words that arrive in order, so we say she has light. By that arithmetic light is a personality trait, distributed at birth, and some of us got the quiet allocation and are expected to live with it graciously. Which would be fine, except it is not what the sentence says. Jesus never said charisma is the light of the world. He named a crowd of farmers and fishermen, chosen exactly so that nobody could mistake the shine for the lamp.

You were lit on purpose, by Someone with taste, and the plainness was part of the choosing. That is the pattern the whole written word runs on, from a shepherd boy nobody bothered to call in from the field to a tax collector's dinner table. His Spirit has not reversed the pattern for Mondays, and He has not made an exception for a woman who reconciles invoices.

There is a second thing hiding under that lie and it is heavier. If light is something about a person, then a quiet life is a dim one, and an ordinary Monday is a wasted lamp. Whole years get written off that way. Marva has nine winters in that coat and she files every one of them under nothing happening, and on one of those nothing mornings a fifteen year old got through her day.

You are already what the sentence describes, and there is no earlier version of you that has to earn it back. 1 Samuel 16:7 settled the looking a long time ago, since the Lord sees what a line at a bus stop cannot see, and Scripture put that beyond argument. What His Spirit adds is that the seeing is happening now, in the rain, in the coat you actually own.