22/04/2026
𝐓𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 💭
𝐃𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐚𝐫𝐤, 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞
Matthew 5:16
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
There is a subtle but dangerous tendency in many of us to become expert commentators on darkness, to sit within dim environments and articulate, sometimes very eloquently, just how deep the night has become, how thick the shadows are, and how little can be seen, as though our accurate description of the problem is in itself a form of contribution, when in truth, it is often nothing more than a refined form of helplessness dressed in intelligence.
It was in the quiet hours of the night, when the world had gone still and my room was swallowed in near total darkness, that I turned slightly. My hand brushed against my wristwatch, and in that small, almost insignificant contact, a faint light came on, not bright, not overwhelming, not enough to flood the room, but enough to interrupt the authority of the darkness that had filled the space just moments before.
And something shifted. The darkness did not vanish, but it was no longer absolute. Its dominance had been questioned, and in that gentle defiance, my eyes began to adjust, and I started to notice what I could not see before. There were other faint outlines, other subtle reflections, even distant traces of light that had always been present but rendered useless under the weight of uninterrupted darkness.
It was a quiet lesson, but a loud truth: darkness does not need to be argued with, it needs to be displaced. And displacement does not require magnitude, it requires presence.
How often do we wait for a kind of “sufficient brightness” before we dare to shine? How often do we excuse our silence, our withdrawal, our blending in, on the basis that what we carry is too small to matter in a world this dark? Not realizing that what God has placed within us was never designed to compete with the sun, but to challenge the night.
That simple song we sang almost carelessly in our early days, “This little light of mine,” carries more theological weight than we gave it credit for, because heaven has never depended on abundance to produce impact; it has always been responsive to availability.
The real tragedy is not the existence of darkness, for that has always been the backdrop against which light reveals its value, but that many who have been entrusted with light have chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to withhold it, to analyze instead of act, to complain instead of illuminate, to adapt to the darkness rather than confront it with what they carry.
But darkness is not intimidated by discussion, no matter how intelligent or passionate, it only responds to light.
Your light may seem small to you, almost insignificant in the face of widespread dimness, but it carries within it a disruptive quality that you may not fully understand, because the moment it is expressed, something shifts, something opens up, something becomes visible that was previously hidden, and sometimes, that single act of shining becomes the permission another person needed to release their own light.
And so the room changes, not all at once, not dramatically, but undeniably. Therefore resist the temptation to become a voice that merely echoes the state of the darkness, and choose instead to become a presence that alters it, because in the end, the question will not be how well you described the night, but whether you dared to shine within it.
Please sing with me. This little light of mine, I’m gonna make it shine.
