What does it mean to let your light shine?

The apostle of Jesus, John, tell wrote that light is love and true love casts out all fear. There is no fear in love. And  Paul, the author of the majority of the New Testament said that love is the most powerful force in existence. Anyone who doubts that statement doesn’t understand what true love is.  It cannot be stopped. Love conquers all. The Bible tells us in I John that God is Love. So, we get from John that love is the true light that shines in the world. Love is light and light is love and light can never be put out. You may kill the lover, but you cannot stop the love. You may destroy the body but the spirit remains and there’s nothing anyone can do about that.

My momma used to say, “If you don’t want to be in the dark, turn on the light.” Seems simple enough, common sense really. Yet, when I visit online or turn on the televion, I feel like “the darkness” of the world gets most of the attention. When I say darkness, I speak of the glorification of the negative aspects of being alive in this natural world. But Jesus told his disciples that the world loves its own because it is comfortable with its own. The light I’m speaking of is the light that shines on us, reminding us that there is more than we can taste, touch, handle and see.  We are more than the shells that house our spirits. We are eternal and the bodies we inhabit are merely vechiles to carry us about while we dwell in this temporal realm, bound by the laws of the finite, physical universe.

I get tired of reading the complaining, angst, somebody-owes-me-something propaganda. I don’t like agony-on-me-poetry, either. It makes my soul sick. So, I thought I’d write from the perspective that not all in the world is dark. Because really, it’s not. Quite frankly, the darkness [not the literal night time of when the stars come out and there is a moon in the sky and a person has the opportunity to rest, but the spiritual darkness which is the bitterness, hate, fear and negativity that tears at a person’s spirit and attempts to rob him or her of hope and joy] is ugly and unappealing to me.  Yes, there is darkness in the world, but there is also light and the light is stronger. The light is a family. The darkness is a dominion. The light is made up of children, brothers and sisters. The darkness has slaves, them and us, manipulations, jealousies, envies, backbiting, drama, haters. It’s up to us to examine ourselves to determine if we are children of the light or  slaves of the darkness.

I don’t understand the world’s love of darkness, except for John once said. He spoke of how the world [not the literal planet but rather the temporal powers that be and all things concentrated on gaining power and control over the rest of creation, particularly fellow human beings] doesn’t comprehend the light so therefore the darkness fears the light and hates the light. Light never fears darkness because its very existence in a situation immediately holds back the darkness. I suppose that’s why I don’t get into things like Supernatural and other television programs that glorifly vampires, imps and manipulative, petty creatures that fear the light. I’m not into cowardness for one thing and for another,  in reality, one confident word spoken in light by a child of the light who understands the power of his or her thoughts and words would send all the demons, vampires and goblins cowering in fear. There would be no need to speak Latin or throw sticks or shoot salt at the boogy men because darkness can only exist when the light isn’t present. The instant light enter a room, darkness flees and it can’t return until the light leaves.

The darkness wants people to think it’s big and bad and all consuming, but really it’s cowardly and deceptive and operates by having a loud mouth that causes people to be afraid. I am never afraid of the darkness because I have a living light inside me, a light that not even death can extinguish. If you break the shell that contains this living light then the light will just spill out and get all over other people. Maybe that is why the darkness fears the light, it’s inextinguishable, it’s unstoppable. Love is light. Not lust, not romance, not mutual benefit, but LOVE, the unfailing, eternal desire to lift the spirits of other human beings. Love, in all its glory, never fails. It is always victorious. If you kill the messenger, the message continues and will not be stopped. I remember how Bessie ten Boom, in a dark Nazi prison camp let her light so shine that women, sentenced to die came to have their candles lit by it. Bessie died there but the light contained in her frail body continued to shine. It shone all over Europe and through her sister, Corrie, it shone for many years  as Corrie took the light Bessie had shared with her into over a hundred countries of the world. Corrie’s light shone on me through a simple book and changed my life.

I tell you this, light, true light that is unfailing love shines in the darkness but the darkness can’t comprehend or overcome it, therefore it seeks to mask it by giving spiritually dark glasses to those who might behold its glare. I refuse to put on the shades offered by the pale attempts of this world. I’m not attracted to darkness so I refuse to glorify it no matter what the current trends may be. I have battled my entire life with the notion that I am wishy-washy because I have difficulty seeing just one side to any argument.  I can’t help that I often see both sides of an issue and I often agree with both parties to some extent. But this one thing, I stand firm on. This one thing is the core of my identity. Greater is that which is inside me than that which is inside this world and that which is inside me is light and that light is love and if you behead me tomorrow you will not kill the love, because it will live on inside every person who has even known me or spoken to me and it will shine through them. Once a person has been truly transformed by the light, no matter how deep and dark a pit they go into, the light will continue to shine.  The Light and Energy inside me are not bound to my body and therefore cannot be stopped. There’s an old spiritual song we used to sing when I was a girl, “I’m gonna live forever, not gonna die, no never.” I know who I am. I am a child of the Light and regardless of what anyone believes, says or does, that will not change. I guess I’m just a stubborn hillbilly that way. So, I will always continue to write, to paint, to sing, for as long as I live in this world in a manner that speaks what I believe to be true…that the light is eternally triumphant and love never fails.

 “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

Let it shine in the devil’s face. I’m gonna let it shine.”