A Ray of Sunshine, They Say

Rain coming in sideways on Beechfield Road, and the woman in the high visibility coat steps off the curb with the sign up and holds the traffic while eleven children and four buggies go across.

She has done this crossing for nine years. She knows which child hates the wind, which one will stop dead in the middle of the road to tell her about a tooth, which mom is running late every single Thursday and is embarrassed about it. She says good morning about sixty times before nine o'clock. On the road behind her, in a hundred kitchens, people say the same thing about her, and they mean it kindly and completely: she is a ray of sunshine, that woman.

And this morning she is standing in the rain with a sign in her hand and there is nothing inside her at all. Not sadness. Nothing. The tank reads empty and has read empty for a while now, and she has kept turning up because turning up is what she does, and nobody has noticed one thing different about her, which is somehow the loneliest part of it.

If you have ever been the ray of sunshine, you know exactly what she is holding. Whatever your corner is, a desk, a ward, a landing at the top of a stair, a phone that rings at dinner time, somebody somewhere has decided you are the warm one, and you have believed them, which means that on a morning like this you are not just tired. You are failing at being yourself. And here is where the whole thing quietly went wrong, years ago and without anybody meaning any harm: you began to think the light was coming out of you.

Nobody ever called you the sun

Let me take one thing off you before anything else. When Jesus said that His people are the light of the world, He was standing on a hillside talking to fishermen and farmers who had done nothing yet, and He was not handing out a job. He was telling them what they were. Then, four sentences later, He talked about a lamp.

Not a sun. A lamp. A lamp in one room, on a stand, so that it gives light to everyone in the house. The whole picture is domestic and small and local. One room, one house, one corner of Beechfield Road, and a lamp does not manufacture anything. It holds oil somebody else brought, and it burns.

So hear this in the rain, exactly where you are. You are the light in that place and you were never the source of it, and both of those have been true on every single morning including this one. That is not a compliment I am paying you. It is what Scripture actually said before anybody turned it into a target, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it burning in a person rather than the person keeping it burning by effort.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

The lamp with pipes running into it

That verse arrives in the middle of one of the strangest pictures in the Bible, and the picture is the point.

A prophet is shown a golden lampstand with seven lamps on it. So far, ordinary temple furniture. But this one has a bowl on the top, and standing either side of it are two olive trees, and running from the trees into the bowl are two golden pipes with golden oil pouring down them. In the actual temple, a priest had to carry the oil in every day. In the vision, nobody carries anything. The trees feed the bowl, the bowl feeds the lamps, and there is not one human hand anywhere in the plumbing.

Then the words come: not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit.

You have a supply line that does not run through your energy levels, and it was installed long before you got tired. The word gives the picture and gives the sentence, and it is His Spirit doing the pouring, which is the only reason anything has stayed lit on the mornings when you had nothing at all to bring.

The day of small things

There is another line a few verses later that people miss because it sounds like a rebuke and is nothing of the kind: who despises the day of small things?

Somebody was looking at a half built house and a handful of workers and finding it unimpressive, and God asks who exactly is doing the despising, because He certainly is not. A lamp in one room is a small thing. Sixty good mornings on a wet sidewalk is a small thing. A cup of tea taken up two flights of stairs to somebody who did not ask for it is a small thing, and Heaven has never once filed it under small.

You have not been assigned a bigger light, and nothing about the size of yours needs improving. Scripture puts the lamp in a house rather than on a hill, and the Holy Spirit is the one who decides which room, which corner and which nine years, not a measure that somebody handed you and told you to grow into.

When there is nothing in you at all

Now the empty morning, because that is where you actually are and I am not going to talk past it.

An empty season is not a verdict. It is not evidence that something has gone wrong between you and God, it is not a failure of anything, and rest is not a dimming. I am not going to promise you a feeling by a certain week either, because I do not know and nobody who tells you otherwise does either.

What I can tell you is where the oil comes from, and that it has not stopped. You are being kept burning right now, on a morning you would not describe as bright, and you are not the one doing the keeping. That is the promise the word makes about His own work in His own people, and His Spirit is carrying it whether or not one thing about it registers on your instruments today.