Reflect the Light

Have you ever woken up when it was still dark outside and been completely confused to what time it is and where you are? Your mind starts asking questions like, where am I? Is this my room, my bed? Is it morning? Did I oversleep?

In the first moments of waking, your mind isn’t completely alert and you struggle to figure out if what you are experiencing is reality or you’re just dreaming. Confusion fills your mind, which sometimes moves to fear. With complete consciousness and turning on lights, comes relief because you know where you are and what is happening.

Life can also be like this. It can be filled with confusion, struggle and fear, without relief in sight. A room is always dark without light to illuminate it and so is a person. Someone without the light and direction of Jesus can live in darkness as if the sun has never risen over the horizon.

Ephesians 5:13 says -But everything exposed by the light becomes visible – and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. 

Everything exposed by the light becomes visible – and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. When we are exposed to the great light of Jesus and allow him to shine through us, everything in us and around us becomes a way of reflecting light. We become like a snowflake, created from ice crystals. When the light hits those crystals it bounces off its angles and reflects the light.  When the light of Jesus shines through us, our light also bumps into other people and illuminates their light.

The snowflake endures quite a process to become a great work of art. While traveling through the atmosphere, it bounces back and forth off of other ice crystals much like itself. This dynamic makes the snowflake become more complex and angular, causing the brightness of the sun to become even more reflected through the ice.

Through our suffering and difficulty, God uses our struggles to hit and bounce off our angles knocking off all the pieces of us that don’t reflect his light, things in us that come from our propensity to sin.

We bump into a trial, for example, and he knocks off a piece of our pride and teaches us humility. He knocks off a chip of our need for approval and we reflect a little more of His light. He humbles us of our self-ambition and His light becomes clearer to those around us. Our pride and selfishness “melts” a bit more, and more light shows through. We refreeze with courage and resolve and it aids in our complexity of His reflection in us.

If you look out at the newly fallen snow covered ground it can fell blinding by its brightness.  That great blanket of white on the ground is filled with light reflecting snowflakes. All those flakes reflecting the sunlight can be blinding. They are fresh and clean and perfectly reflecting the greatness of the light. Our countenance should be like that freshly fallen snow. It should be blinding with the light of Christ. We should reflect his light so brightly that its stands out to everyone we meet. Then everything that we illuminate will also become a light.