We don’t keep the lights on, God does
The other day I thought; not about how much it cost to keep our church’s light’s on, nor about how long we will be able to do it but pondered why and on whom they shine. It was like receiving a special revelation from God.
I thought about the six youth group members who switch them on every Monday for two hours. Two thirds of them doesn’t have parents that attend church or taught them the basics of the Bible and faith. Two of them didn’t follow me at all when you explained to them Gary Chapman’s five love languages because in their own words, their parents are “too F*@%ed up to show them love”. I was reminded of how one of the girl’s mom drinks her days away and how that girl told the seventy plusser who lovingly and consistently meets with them every Monday, that she loves her with all her heart and don’t know what she will do without her. I thought of the other boy who until recently slept under a bridge because his mother was an addict. It is on these children that that light in the basement shines every Monday.
I also recalled why the lights are lit on a Tuesday when the small African Church gathers with their pastor, who teaches at a school because they cannot pay him a salary. How their bodies move energetically and their faces light up just like those lights during their choir practice when they sing God’s praises. How they help each other learn better English, find jobs and best of all, recognize grace. How they mop the floors as part of their rent but also as an expression of their gratitude. I know that because I hear them singing as they do it.
I think of why the lights are switched on a Wednesday, when the Bible study group gathers to read Scripture and, in all vulnerability and love, figure out the relevance of it for their current life phase and situation. How you sometimes feel you are on holy ground in that study as people you never expected it from, gives you new insight into the meaning of very old stories that somehow never really gets old.
I thought of how winter Friday evenings are also now evenings where the doors are opened and the lights are switched on, only briefly from 9 pm to 10 pm as the 15 homeless enter to what is introduced to them as an emergency shelter during the cold nights. At 10 am the lights are switched off and two staff members sit in chairs listening to homeless people breathing deeply and sleeping peacefully, probably for the only time that day. At 7 am the next morning they are ordered out as the Adventist church who hasn’t got their own building, enters at 8 am to set up and cook their vegetarian dishes for fellowship after worship. At 1 pm they depart. All looks quiet but then at 6 pm the Narcotics Anonymous group enters. They have amongst them an ex drug leader, no four, a guy that got out of prison a month ago and a mom whose children got taken away because of her drug habit. Tonight, a new guy will join them and share his painful story of abuse. They will embrace this man who have been rejected by his whole family. They don’t have one theology degree amongst them, but you will learn more of God from them than in a room full of professors in theology.
What I most vividly recall is the event I get witness most. The Sunday morning worship service where you sometimes enter wondering if these people are really your people but leave convinced and honored that they indeed are for the very fact that you have not chosen them, nor they you but God chose us for each other-that gathering of oddballs no human could have thought out. The electric light you will know, is not the only or the best light that shines at this gathering but the light of the gospel in sermon, song and fellowship, the one that costs less than the electricity but is worth infinitely more. I think of this light every time when we carry out this light to the outside, handing out free hot dogs after worship to whoever shows up with a handful of volunteers at the hot dog ministry, while the next church shows up to gather under the same light.
Maybe, if we consider all who gather on underneath the lights our churches keeps on, we might suddenly realize that the glory was not only in the yesterdays. That today also is filled with God’s glory. Because its God’s own gathered under those lights and He is with them. That He is as unfazed by the eb and flow of people gathered in a place as He is about the eb and flow of the tides in the ocean. Because He commands both.
You might even drive past big and impressive church buildings with many lights on your way to your local neighbourhood church and not even consider stopping there because the local one with the light in the basement on weekdays and in the sanctuary on Sundays, paradoxically, happened to be the place that set your heart alight with the love of Jesus. Where other buildings made you marvel at their lights, this one lit your internal one up and made you shine.
When I think of all this my worries and aguish about how we are going to get the Church to grow and keep the lights on, subsides.
Because I realize it was never really kept on by me or other people. We did not have light in us, we were called to it by it’s Source. We only reflect the Light of the World, whose grace shines upon us and forever will, some way or the other. God’s way.
Once a little girl sat next to her mother in a big cathedral. Pointing to the figures depicted in the stained-glass windows of the building, she asked her mother: “Who are those people?”. “They are saints”, her mother replied. After a moment of silence, the girl exclaimed: “Now I know what saints are! They are people who let the light shine through them”. Amen.
Gabriel J Snyman
Monday November 25, 2019