For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. (Ephesians 5:8-13)
We
discussed this passage yesterday, but today as I published it, something leaped
out that I want to explore. Remember seeing this interesting picture?
I’m
like the person who captioned it. I never thought about it, but it makes
perfect sense. Light doesn’t create a shadow because shadows are only created
when light is blocked. It’s the result of an eclipse.
But
here’s another photo
Again,
we have shadows where something is blocking the sun. We can also see the light
of the sun and the effect that the sunlight has on the air and the camera lens.
But we don’t really see the light striking the rocks, or at least that’s our
perception. The light waves/particles (depending on your perception) aren’t visible.
Some would say they’re too small to be seen, but so are water molecules. Put enough
of them together and you can see a puddle or an ocean, and the same goes for light.
Put enough together and you get the sun in the picture above.
Somewhere
in your education, you probably learned that the colors that we see are the reflection
of light. It’s the light that the object being struck by light doesn’t absorb. What
you would see looking at my shirt would be the reflected short-wave, blue
light. But you don’t see it as light. You only see it as color. Sir Isaac
Newton is given the credit for discovering the properties of light thanks to his
treatise, Optics, published in 1704, and I don’t mean to dim his light on
the subject. He did good and important work. But at the same time, there’s this
passage with the words, But everything exposed by
the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a
light.
Another of the things Sir Isaac discovered is that light can be “broken”
into a spectrum of colors, hence a rainbow, not unlike love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. They can’t
really be separated, but we perceive them as being so.
So there are two ways in which the light may be revealed. The
first is the Light within us shining out from us. It can be hard to look at
directly but is best seen as reflections or influences on what is around us. Or
we can be the surface off of which the light ricochets in certain wavelengths
from us. God’s light of mercy may reflect from us as joy, kindness or any other
of the “rainbow” (AKA fruit) of the Spirit. It is how our life
gains color and, therefore, beauty.
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