“Reading about the Light will never make you shine.” Leonard Sweet’s words cut through my comfortable theological understanding like sunlight piercing through dusty cathedral windows. As I read them for the first time this morning, they gave me pause and felt less like wisdom and more like an indictment.
The word tells me to be salt and light — a calling I’ve carried in my heart for years, shared and prayed about with and for others. Yet as I sat in the quiet of dawn, coffee growing cold beside me, I confronted a truth that made my chest tight: I have no light inside of me. At least, not one I could feel burning.
Darkness and bitterness, I’ve come to realize, are my natural tendencies. They rise within me like old friends, familiar and uninvited. When someone cuts me off in traffic, when a conversation goes sideways, when disappointment settles like sediment in my soul — there they are, waiting. The bitter thoughts, the dark assumptions, the quick judgments that spring from some deep well I wish I could cap forever.
This realization might have crushed me entirely if not for biblical examples of grace: I love reading stories of how the light shines in others. There’s something magnetic about testimonies of transformation, about people who have found their way from shadow to illumination. I embrace and empathize with these stories, turning them over in my mind, marveling at their beauty. In them, I catch glimpses of what’s possible, what God can do with willing hearts.
But here lies the paradox that has haunted my spiritual journey: I fail to see how my Father’s light shines in me at times. While I can spot grace at work in others from miles away, I struggle to recognize it in my own reflection. It’s as if I’m standing too close to the mirror, seeing only the flaws, the shadows, the places where light seems to get swallowed whole.
This blindness leads me into a familiar cycle. I would ask for forgiveness — genuinely, desperately — and intellectually know it is forgiven as a child of Christ. The theology was sound, the promise clear, the transaction complete in the eyes of heaven. Yet something remained unsettled, like a song played in the wrong key.
The problem I discovered wasn’t with God’s forgiveness. His forgiveness is sufficient in every way, complete and lavish and inexhaustible. The problem was with me, with the fortress I had built around my own acceptance of that grace. My personal emotions — shame, doubt, the voice that whispers “not enough” — had become blockers, standing guard at the door of my heart, refusing entry to the very thing I needed most.
Knowing of His forgiveness, I learned through tears and time, is not the same as accepting His forgiveness. Knowledge lives in the head, safe and clean and manageable. Acceptance requires something far more vulnerable: it demands that we open our hands and let grace fall into our palms like rain, trusting that we are worthy to receive what we could never earn.
This distinction changed everything. By embracing His forgiveness — really embracing it, not just acknowledging it — I began to understand that I was allowing His light to shine. Not manufacturing light, not working up some spiritual glow through effort and discipline, but simply stepping aside and letting what was already there become visible.
The truth that emerged from this struggle is both simple and profound: His light will only be reflected if I embrace His grace on the journey of life. Not at the destination, not when I’ve gotten my act together, not when I feel worthy, but here, now, in the midst of my very human tendency toward darkness and bitterness.
Today, when those familiar shadows rise within me, I try to remember that light isn’t the absence of darkness — it’s what remains when we stop fighting the grace that’s been offered all along. Leonard Sweet was right: reading about the light will never make me shine. But accepting it, embracing it, letting it settle into the broken places of my heart? That I’m learning is where the real illumination begins.
Perhaps that’s the greatest grace of all: not that we become perfect vessels of light, but that we become willing ones, cracked and beautiful, letting heaven’s brightness leak through every imperfect seam.