Matthew 5:16 – “…let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
As I was driving to work this morning, Matthew 5:16 came to mind and not in the way you might expect. You see, I struggle with fear and one of my biggest fears is driving in the dark.
In the past couple of years, I have even taken my fears to a professional. My therapist, Emilie, taught me that fears build on each other. If we have deep-rooted fear(s) that we have not dealt with, it can begin to magnify all our other little fears and anxieties into bigger fears as well.
The winter months are brutal in Ohio. It is cold. It is snowy. In addition, it is dark in the mornings and dark by late afternoon. I can handle the late afternoon darkness….I have even come to enjoy it for the few months of the year. I come home from work, immediately change into my pajamas and settle in for a cozy evening at home. How fun and wintery, right? However, the mornings are a different story. You see, I have to leave my house by 6:30 a.m. for my ½-hour drive to work, and in the winter months, some days sunrise is not until 8 a.m. In addition, I live in a rural area so there are long stretches of road with no streetlights. Therefore, my drive to work is in darkness….like total darkness!
We moved back to my little, rural hometown a little over 5 years ago. I was so happy to find a job similar to what I had done the previous 20 years in the city, so when I began the drive to work in the mornings, I did not even consider that it might be dark. However, as I continued the drive day after day in the dark mornings, the fear started to creep in. Up until then, I had no known fear of driving in the dark. However, the well-meaning warnings from family members to “watch out for all the deer”, and my growing fear of what may be around the corner in the darkness slowly began to overtake my thoughts. Long story short – this eventually led me to my therapist, Emilie, who has helped me greatly and given me the tools to overcome this fear (most days).
So, this brings me to today and the point of my story. Spring is finally here and this morning, April 8th, the sunrise was at 6:57 a.m. So today, when I left my house at 6:30, it was not totally dark. You see, even when the sun is still below the horizon, its rays strike the upper atmosphere and scatter down to us! Additionally, the atmosphere bends sunlight, making the sun appear to rise earlier than it actually does! Amazing, isn’t it?
As I was driving this morning with just a little light, I felt so much more relaxed and less fearful. You see, just that little bit of light, even before the sun actually rose, made all the difference as to how I felt. That is why Matthew 5:16 came to mind. Jesus told us to let our light shine before others, so that they may see our good deeds and glorify God. If that little bit of light before the sunrise can make such a difference in how I feel – my safety, my mood, my peace, my comfort – how much better could we make others feel by shining our light on them?
Life in this world is hard. We all see it. We all feel it. It seems everywhere we look people are hurting, so let us commit to letting our light shine before others every day. It is a ripple effect - we let our light shine on them so that they will glorify God, and God’s light and love changes everything!
Even when we feel like we do not have a lot of light to shine, just like the sky before the sunrise, no matter how small, your light may be just what someone else needs to shine God’s light and love into their lives.
-Denise
0 comments