I’m big on lights. Four lights in my house are almost always on, electric bill or no. One is the lamp on my fireplace in the window above my air conditioner, one is the recessed light above my heart statue, one is a light right inside my back door, and the fourth is my porch light. Day and night, unless I am home during the day and think to turn them off then, they shine.
As I told you last week, recently a friend loaned me a camera. It’s kind of like a fifth light that’s always on, because although it doesn’t shine, it enables me to see.
All was quiet for a few days as the camera recorded the silent face of the damaged mini barn, squirrels tight roping across the wires above the barn, and the occasional sympathetic neighbor or passerby, stopping to stare at the graffiti and the broken window. It caught me going for a walk a few times, and a kind and knowledgeable carpenter from church, investigating the broken window and measuring for a new one.
On Friday evening, I went to buy candles and wood crafts produced by our boys and girls club.
When I returned, I collapsed briefly on the couch and fiddled with my phone, trying to talk myself into studying a few more hours so I could finish my class in good time. I browsed over to the camera app, from which I can see the activity outside my window.
There was a car in my backyard, at approximately 6:10 pm.
Odd.
(Also odd that it was hardly surprising.)
I watched the short clip, a gray Chevy pulling into my yard from the back alley, and a young man climbing out of the driver’s seat. The driver held a white string in his hands and appeared to be calling to some buddies, two of whom then arrived on foot from opposite directions. The one held a red cloth, with which he began to wipe the upper part of the rear driver’s side door. Then he opened the rear door, and pulled out a baseball bat and a black vest. He handed the vest to the driver, who put it on, and tossed the baseball bat through the broken window of my mini barn, where it could be heard clattering against the floor boards. Every movement was quick and sure.
Then the driver and one of the friends got in and the car pulled away, backing the same direction it had come. The third friend had already jogged away.
I got off the couch and I walked out to my mini barn and I looked inside. A baseball bat was lying in the middle of the barn floor.
A camera doesn’t lie. Light doesn’t lie. By its nature, it reveals the truth.
There’s a lot of light at my workplace too. There are the powerful overhead lights in the operating rooms over the table. The surgeons wear lights on their foreheads too, that beam down on the area they are working on, or anywhere that they turn their heads. The hospital itself never sleeps. The lights are on all night.
I had a little post traumatic stress this afternoon from the work week. I set a record, by the way, by walking 28,000 steps one day. Besides the aching feet was my aching heart and mind.
I saw again the drawn faces of family members, their relief to see me, the tension returning the times I could give them no definite answers. I saw the screen with the blood pressure numbers dropping. I saw the plastic drainage tubes running red. I re-lived my own flight down the three sets of stairs, the phone calls I cut off, the tears at the back of my eyes without warning.
I was reading in Isaiah and encountered,
Cry aloud; do not hold back. Isaiah 58:1
… And suddenly I burst into unstoppable tears. I just couldn’t stop crying from the burden of pain, stress, and exhaustion that I had not been able to process.
After I managed to stop crying, I went on.
If you pour yourself out for the hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noon day.
And I thought of my other favorite verses, from Psalm 139, that one I often quote mentally as I walk through the darkness to the hospital….
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
And then today too, I noticed for the first time that my mini barn is nearly painted. Because I was at work for 14 and 15 hours the last two days I never noticed the painter arrive or leave.
But my camera had seen it all!
And then my new window arrived, in the rain!
Baseball bat proof, I hope. Such a product of skill and kindness.
God sees everything. His work is unaffected by darkness, other than to shine more brightly. His Word is unaffected by darkness, other than to shine more brightly.
His Word is exactly what Psalms says, a lamp to our feet. It gives us direction, courage, and strength, just as this afternoon, it both helped me work through my grief and then it helped me dry my tears.
I love those four lights that are always on. I love the camera and my candles.
But even more, I love that other light that never goes out, the Word and Presence of God.