09/02/2026
September 2, 2026 - Daily Devotional
The summer of 1975, I was eleven years old, sitting front row center at the Royal Theater in Pauls Valley when “Jaws” came to town. The lights went down. That low, patient bass line started. And for the next two hours I learned that the ocean — which I'd only ever thought of as something to swim in — was also something that could hide whatever it wanted from you, for as long as it wanted, until it decided to stop hiding.
Wendy and I watched “Jaws" again recently. Fifty-one years later, same movie, same dread when the barrel disappears under the water. Some things don't lose their power.
What struck me this time, though, wasn't the shark itself. It was the dark. Spielberg barely shows you the thing for the first hour — just fins, shadows, the suggestion of something large moving beneath a surface that looks calm from above. The terror isn't the shark. It's not knowing. It's the not-being-able-to-see.
I think that's true of more than sharks.
Most of what frightens us — in a diagnosis, a decision, a season we didn't choose — isn't the thing itself. It's the not-knowing. The waiting in the dark for whatever's moving beneath the surface to show itself. We spend so much energy staring at water, bracing for a fin.
Which may be why John didn't describe the light as something that has to defeat the darkness, explain it, or fully dispel it. He simply wrote: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5, RSV). Not "will overcome it someday." Not "might, if it fights hard enough." Has not. Present tense, already settled, however deep or wide the dark water gets.
That's a strange kind of victory — quiet, ongoing, not particularly dramatic. No music swells. No one holds up a trophy. The light simply keeps shining, and the dark simply keeps failing to put it out, one ordinary day after another.
I was eleven years old in that front-row seat, sure the ocean was full of things I couldn't see coming. I'm considerably older now, and I still believe that — about oceans, and about most everything else. But I've also watched enough people at St. Luke's keep shining in seasons that should have swallowed them to know that the dark doesn't actually get the final word. It never has.
Wendy fell asleep about twenty minutes before the end. I stayed up and watched it through, the way I did back in Pauls Valley — a little older, a little less afraid of the water, considerably more sure of who put the light there in the first place.
Some things hide in the dark beneath the surface. But the light was there first, and it isn't going anywhere.
-Chris Lambert, Director, Meals On Wheels Oklahoma City
