Looking for Light

There are dark things happening in the world.

As much as I try, for the sake of my soul, to keep the news at arm’s length, it finds a way in. Its hard to watch cameras sharing scenes of violence, especially knowing they’re doing it mostly to keep your eyes glued to the screen for their commercials.

Illness? In my work with Seniors with dementia producing illnesses I’ve experienced more people who’ve died of Covid than I have fingers and toes. So have all the others who work with me. So have countless nurses and providers all over this country. A decade or more, perhaps to the end of our lives, we’ll remember these days and those faces.

But the light, the light is still shining out there if you dare to look for it, if you choose to turn off your yammering TV and see beyond the walls of quarantine. First the light of God which is undimmed by any of the darkness of this world. Second, the light of God shining through the goodness of humans who’ve chosen to do good for each other, sometimes even at their own peril. Third, the goodness of God in the creation that reveals itself like a rose in the middle of thorns. All of it is there, undenied, undying, and real to those who have the faith to see with eyes attuned not to just the present but also to that which is real beyond the present.

We all see what we want to see, what we’ve been conditioned to see, what our culture tells us to see. Some much of it is one dimensional, a present of only the here and now and that’s both unreal and a shame. Unreal because truly there is so much more than only that which meets the eye in any given moment and a shame because if a person hasn’t figured out how to see with the eyes of faith they will be forced to live without seeing the whole picture, to live as if the TV was all there is.