A Million Little Lights

I was brushing my teeth, standing at my back door tonight, thinking about starting residency tomorrow. I was asking God to give me guidance about tomorrow, to protect me and show me what I must do. With the sound of my electric toothbrush whirring in my ears, I examined my reflection in the glass of the back door. I was post-shower; my hair was damp, my nose was shiny, and my cotton PJ's were draped softly against me. Suddenly, a small light appeared over my head and my eyes flashed to it in surprise. It took me a second to realize that it was a lightening bug outside the window. I remember as a kid waiting for these creatures to show up every summer. Little candles, floating effortlessly in the night. I chased them, caught them and put them in jars, let them sit on my hands and watched as they lit up the dark corners of summertime moments.

The summer I was 13, on a black and chilly night, I was sitting on my grandparents' porch in Illinois. My grandmother had just turned off the lights in the house to go to bed and I found myself sitting on the porch swing, staring out over the fields bushy with corn. The lights went out and everything in front of my eyes went charcoal. As my vision adjusted, I gripped the wooden edges of the swing. Slowly, charcoal went to gray and gray went to navy. I could make out the tips of the corn stalks and what appeared to be a haze floating just above the field. As the scene finally popped into focus, I saw millions of tiny lights. There were more lightening bugs out over that field than I had ever seen. It was amazing. Where the horizon merged with the sky, I couldn't tell the difference between the stars and the countless floating twinkles. I'll never forget that.

My thoughts turned back the scene in front of me tonight. There weren't nearly as many lightening bugs outside my back window tonight as there were on that night years ago, but it got me to thinking about what I had just asked of God. "Show me what I must do", I had just prayed and then the Lord's words came to me - let them see your light (Matthew 5:15). When I make mistakes, when I fall short, when I'm tired, when I'm frustrated, when I stand by a child's bedside, when I talk to parents, when I do the right thing, when I encourage, reassure, diagnose or just don't know - let them see your light. That's what He wants, that's why I'm here, and that's what I'll do.