Sometimes, more often than not, very often, well you can determine the frequency of it in your own life, an experience in the physical happens first and then it seeps all lit up into the spiritual. Or it frames the spiritual with clarity and precision.

It takes hearing and living this seven times seventy for it to shine its light of truth on my little world.

A gifted teacher of the Word in my world who peeled back layers of understanding for me taught this, said this, focused on this principle for years. And I get it with wave on wave of new ah ha’s.

And all the strings of white lights now make sense. How I go back to the corner store, the one in another zip code where I can be dirty from cleaning house and pray to remain anonymous. As if that weren’t broken irony in and of itself; my hiding while seeking light. To try and hide the dirt and hope to not be recognized, pitiful, dirty me.

I understand why I peel back the layers of the bills, green with faces of men in government, to add more light to our darkness. Add layers of light. Find another dark corner to light up.

How the corners of the house are lit and warm and white,  hoping to reflect holy. Searching for glimpses of His glory. Looking to capture His Love in our home, His warm redemptive beauty.

And when I lay down at night and when I rise in the morning, there is all this Light. And it was born in that dark barn. It lit up the world with bright Hope. Changing us from a shadowy dark people into a place where there is living breathing Light.

Transforming us and chasing away the darkness for once and for all and forever. White, a bright symbol of a Radiant Savior, for a few weeks, blazing trails on the hearts of the broken to dwell in us for eleven other months. In celebration of all He gave in coming to us in the middle of the bleak winter of our lives.

We wonder what it is in our DNA that wants to run the cords around the home, plug into the outlets for more and more of the bright. To run from the shadows of the dark and dingy and the hiding places into the Light of New Life.

To wake to Light, to live our days in Light, to go to bed with Light.

Doesn’t our soul long for more of the bright Light that came to a lost and desperate world.

We celebrate in ways which falter and fail in their dim replica of His brilliance. What this love of Jesus, this shining Savior, this Christ light, a Bright Hope Jesus, brought into the dark world. We try to come up with things to look like holy to point to his blindingly brilliant love.

The lights are a way to shine today to symbolize what is truly eternal in His Love.

Why would we live dim dark dank shadowy hidden lives when we can walk into the Light– and stay there.

I look at the strings of lights and see the physicality of the spirituality of The Light of The World.

And I long to leave my lights up all year long, oh how I dread the grays of the Januarys of the soul. I dread the grays. Dread the dark. Its shallow breathing, heaviness. Its call to come and hide. To cower in sin and cover up.

So while we walk out Advent and step into that glorious Christmas Day, I want to soak in His Light, bask in His glory, and seek Him on all the dark days of my messy living

And I don’t have to keep the lights up all year because He came in the dark of night to bring Light to a dying world.

Nothing can dim that fact, or take from it, or lesson the brightness of His radiant glory. Even when the cords and strands go back to their dark dusty attic to lay boxed in cardboard. To wait to shine again next year. To point to Him.

Grateful dear Lord for your Light in my darkness.

Grateful that you infuse Light into the bloodstream of our very lives.

And that you call us to live in this brilliant place of radiant grace.

Where even without hundreds of chords of light streaming white, imitating in a fragile failing way Your Beauty, we will have all the Light we could ever need.

We have the streaming brilliance of our Savior.

Amen? Amen.