Duracell? Are you kidding? Tuesday April 3 Another Holy Week Observation

My grandparents had a thing for night-lights. There was hardly a room in their home that didn't have one. I used to tease my granddad that if a storm ever blew the roof from the house pilots would think they had found the airstrip. It seemed to me that there was never darkness in their home. Yet, in my own home in kidhood, I was raised with The Mole People, as I called my mom and dad. I knew that you turned the lights out when you left the room, Pop reminded us that we could turn them back on when we returned...if we returned, (he knew kids.) It wasn't a matter of economy that lights were not left on, it was really more about comfort as my mother tends to be pretty light sensitive. Yet, between these two homes I never felt like I was over or under exposed to the light.

April 21, 1972, “I saw the light,” as the old Gospel song says. The church that I grew up in would have said that or that I had, “been saved.” I didn't see it as any miraculous event but one that simply made sense. In fact, it would be safe to say that I had a child like faith at that time and I was acting on it. Believing in Jesus seemed simple to me, I never saw it as complicated, I still don't even though there have been many who have come along that have tried to make it so. Faith is simply child like in my book

John 12:35-36, these verses seem at first to be complicated to me, but really they are as simple as daylight and dark. Jesus uses the comparison of light and dark to explain to his followers what the next few days are going to be like for them. If they don't stay close to him they will run the risk of being in increased danger as he knows that there is a darkness in the hearts of the government and religious leaders who want to put an end to his work. He tells his disciples that if they stay close to him while he is there with them, they will have an illuminated path. Jesus is telling them, I'm the light, you're safe here. I won't always be with you to protect you. Yet in typical Jesus style he instructs them if they believe in him, commit to him, he will give them light, his light, and it will be within them; it will shine through their lives. He said they will have the title Children of Light.

While there may have been enough lights, lamps, night-lights and flashlights in my grandparent's home to do surgery by, my childhood home was never really dark. Each one of us made decisions based on child like faith to accept the tittle, Children of Light.

Jesus offers to each of us an opportunity to own the real “Maglight” and he makes it clear that taking his Maglight for our own we will never be searching through kitchen drawers, junk drawers or auto glove boxes looking for AA Duracells.