Morning Thanks--Christmas lights

In two churches in two weeks in two towns, we just happened to hear the same preacher, a sub. One of the churches is newly vacant, the other needed a fill-in, their own under-shepherds (as old folks used to call them) out of town. 

You can't blame the sub for double-dipping. I've done it myself often enough, and I'm quite sure we were the only ones in the congregation that second week who'd been in the other the week before. 

She took her text from John 1, and proceeded to hold forth on verse 5: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." It was, as all good and healthy sermons are, expositions on the same tune an angel choir sang in the night sky long, long ago: "Fear not." If the Bible says "the darkness did not overcome it," and it is "word made flesh," than why should we be weary with worry?

In the cold of winter, 1863, three or four persistent missionaries wouldn't forsake hundreds of Dakota people imprisoned at Ft. Snelling after "the Sioux Uprising." Hundreds of settlers had been brutally murdered in a killing spree quite unlike anything anyone had ever seen or experienced. Hatred grew into a flame in Minnesota, only recently become a state. White folks wanted all of its Indians dead or gone. 

Those missionaries ministered to suffering, innocent Santees and were filleted by the press for squandering the riches of the Christian faith on animals. I could quote. More than once, when they left the prison, they were beaten.

I doubt any schoolchild in the state of Minnesota heard that story this year. Emboldened by faith and the Word Made Flesh, those missionaries would not let the darkness overcome the light. 

But then, I could run through a list as long as my arm of stories that feature men and women who believed themselves to be children of the light, and, Lord knows, were not. 

Two weeks in a row I heard that same sermon, but left, sadly, unconvinced, not because she did a lousy job, but because that arm's length-list doesn't disappear beneath a sport coat's long sleeves. I know dozens of such stories. So do you.

An old fashioned light stands beside me in my window down here, something my wife's aged aunt left behind in her attic. Replacement bulbs may not be available anymore, but right now, dawn still two hours away, that phony plastic candelabra is pure beauty--a light in the darkness.

I put an old artificial monster out in the garden, a tree our kids gave up on. We've got no real trees in the backyard, and Lord knows we get wind, and will today again, forty-miles-an-hour plus. Already I hear it moan. 

I put up that tree a week or so ago, tied it down with twine the wind snapped as if it were wound from toilet paper. The morning after our first snow, that old tree was lying there dead in the snow, in pieces. I wrestled it back up, strung it with new lights, and wired it in place this time. It's doing well, tipped a bit southeast, but I would be too out there in our relentless northwest winds.

So this is what I see when I look outside right now. I'm not about to win a contest, but it's light in the darkness. The darkness has not overcome. 

I don't know that another soul on earth is blessed by what's here. From the road, you hardly notice. Lights of the cattle trucks on Hwy 60 go by at all hours, but from there, I'm sure, no trucker notices anything. 

There's no shortage of Christmas lights. Lots of folks in town go all out--dangling icicles, inflatable Santas, homespun creches, all of it lit for Christmas.

And there's this little gem. My wife buys a tiny tree every year, something small for down here.

Just one of the blessings of Christmas--and there are many--is lights in the darkness. Lord knows they can get garish, but the older I get, the younger I feel around them, enchanted really. 

The wind right now is howling all around. The lights are a blessing. That tree is taking a beating again; but listen! the darkness does not overcome. That's what she said. Twice I heard it, but then, even at Christmas, it bears repeating.