For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth)
Ephesians 5:8-9 (NIV)
Already Light in the Lord
In the evening the dining hall of a workers’ dormitory is the brightest room in the building, and the fullest. Long tables, steel trays, overhead lights that stay on until the last man is out. One of them eats near the window with his phone face down beside the tray, and he’ll get through the meal without saying a word to anyone or being spoken to. There’s more light on him in there than anywhere else he’ll stand all day, and it hasn’t made him known to a single person at those tables.
Paul writes to people in Ephesus who had been darkness. Now they’re light in the Lord, and he tells them to live like children of it, and he names what grows out of that light: all goodness, righteousness and truth. The change is God’s work, and everything Paul asks of them comes out of it.
It was finished before Paul asked anything of them, and it holds on the evenings when there’s nothing to feel and the stairs look better than the table. Paul tells them to live out something that is already true of them.
The fruit Paul names seems to need somewhere to go, and in that dining hall it would have to travel the width of a steel table and no farther. Whatever living as children of light turns out to mean, it arrives at the man sitting at the next tray, through people who have no idea they’re carrying it.
He’ll take his tray to the hatch in a minute and go up the stairs, and the men who ate beside him tonight won’t know his name tomorrow either. Who sat near you that you couldn’t name now?
A Prayer to Remember
Set me beside the person no one is talking to. I’ve eaten in full rooms and walked out without learning a single name. Make me good company to someone who’s had none. You’ve said already what I am; teach me what a person like that does at a table.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
