The Light Was Already On

There is a lanyard in a shoebox in Renee Aldridge's closet, and she has moved house twice with that shoebox and never once considered leaving it behind.

It is from the summer of 2011. A laminated badge with her name spelled wrong, a strip of orange yarn somebody tied on, and a smell of lake water that has no business still being in a piece of plastic after all this time. She was nineteen. It was five days in a camp with bad plumbing and a cafeteria that served the same casserole twice, and she has never in her life been more sure of what she was for.

She is thirty-four now. She adjusts claims for a regional insurer, and she is good at it, and there is nothing wrong with her week.

She has simply concluded, without ever once saying it in words, that the sending happened in 2011 and she was there for it and it does not come around twice.

Whatever God is genuinely doing in the world, He is doing it in some other zip code, with people who have more to offer than a woman who spends her afternoons on the phone about hail damage.

Across the street from Renee there is a boy named Dev, and he is fifteen, and every evening at dusk he shoots baskets in his driveway.

Hood up, headphones in, one ball, no one else. He shoots until it is genuinely too dark to see the rim and then he shoots eleven more. Renee has waved at him from her mailbox for two years. That is the entire history of their acquaintance: two years of waving.

Then a Thursday in September, and the ball comes over her fence.

She throws it back without saying anything, because that is what you do.

Ten minutes later it comes over again.

And this time Renee picks it up and holds it, and she walks it down to the end of her own driveway instead of pitching it over, and she stands there with it under her arm until he comes around the hedge.

"Dev, right?" she said. She knew it from a package the mail carrier put in her box by mistake in March.

And he pushed one headphone off and said, "Hey, Miss Renee."

She had to hold onto the ball a second longer than was natural.

He already knew her name.

Two years of waving at a mailbox, and a boy across the street had known exactly who she was the entire time. She had not been invisible. She had been the woman across the street. She had been that for two years without knowing she was anything at all.

"You're out here every night," she said. "You're getting good."

"Nothing else to do."

"Well," Renee said, "my porch light's better than yours. If yours goes out, come use mine."

It was not a speech. It was eleven words about a light bulb.

Dev said, "Cool," and took his ball and went back around the hedge.

He came over twice that fall, when the bulb on his side finally went. His mother waved from the porch both times. Renee brought out two folding chairs and a bag of pretzels and did not say one wise thing all evening, and sat there in the cold watching a fifteen year old shoot free throws in her light.

Which had been on the whole time.

Let it shine

Jesus says one sentence about your light and every word in it is doing work, especially the first one.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.Matthew 5:16

Let.

Not make. Not manufacture. Not go somewhere and start one. He has just told them that a city set on a hill cannot be hid, and that nobody lights a candle in order to put a basket over it, and then He says let, which is a word for taking something off, not for adding something on.

You are a light. Not becoming one, not applying to be one, not one of these days when your life settles down. You are one, and Somebody else made you one. That is not my flattery. The written word has Jesus saying ye are the light of the world before He says one word about shining, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that in you and has never taken it back for a single quiet year.

Now look at where He points it. Before men. The men in front of you. Not across an ocean, not in a stadium, not in some other zip code with better people in it. The ones already standing within the reach of your ordinary evening.

And look at what He calls the light. Your good works. Not a program you launch. The things you are already doing, most of which you would not think to name.

So let me put a hard thing gently, because you have been carrying a verdict for years and nobody has taken it off you.

The conclusion that the sending already happened and you missed the bus has no right to stay in your chest. Scripture says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, which means He does not issue them and then quietly withdraw them at thirty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a calling warm in a person who is convinced it went cold years ago.

That week in 2011 was real. Nothing here takes an ounce of it off you. God was in that field, and the girl with the badge spelled wrong was not imagining a thing.

But He was not doing a one-time thing. He was doing what He always does, which is show a person that they carry something, and He does not confine that lesson to a week with bad plumbing.

You were not disqualified by turning thirty-four, and you were not passed over for being ordinary. The written word says God chose the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, and the Spirit is the one who does most of His work through people nobody would have put on the poster.

Here is what I am not going to do. I am not going to hand you a fuller calendar.

Nothing in this asks you to go anywhere, add anything, sign up for something, or grind yourself thinner for God. The verse does not say build a light. It says let it shine. Take the basket off. That is the whole instruction and it costs you nothing you do not already have.

And notice how the sentence ends, because it takes the pressure off you completely. That they may glorify your Father. The outcome is not your result to produce. It is His name, and He looks after His own name.

This is yours: an ordinary evening, an ordinary street, and a light you did not light and cannot put out. Scripture says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them, and walk is a word for the pace of a person going about their week, and the Holy Spirit has already laid those works out in front of you like stones in a path.