Strengthened by the Light

I told my mom one day before leaving for Africa and Europe last fall that I often got scared at nighttime. During the day, I felt strong and empowered to take care of all the details required for my trip, but at night when everyone was asleep and the house was silent, I began to fear the transition and doubt my ability to carry through with my plans.

"But Lauren, that's why Jesus is the light," was my mom's simple but powerful response. I have carried those words with me all over the world in the last year and have pulled them out of my pocket for the many times I have needed an extra dose of strength.

By this time, I have read all of the books I brought to China more than once, as English books are difficult to come by in Guiyang and I am a bit of of book worm. I just happened to be re-reading a Donald Miller book the other day, and he talks about this issue of God being light. My mom's "pocket truth" has become all the more meaningful with Miller's thoughts to supplement it.

God makes a cosmos out of the nothingness, a molecular composition, of which He is not and never has been, as "anything" is limiting, and God has no limits. In this way, He "isn't," and yet "is." The poetic imagery is rather beautiful, stating that all we see and feel and touch, the hardness of dense atoms, the softness of a breeze is the breath of God. And into this being, into this existence, God first creates light. This light is not to be confused with the sun and moon and stars, as they are not created until later. He simply creates light, a nonsubstance that is "like" a particle and "like" a wave, but perhaps neither, just some kind of traveling energy. A kind of magnetic wave. 

Light, then, becomes a fitting metaphor for a nonbeing who is. God, if like light, travels at the speed of light, and because space and time are mingled with speed, the speed of light is the magic, exact number that allows a kind of escape from time. Scientists have played with atomic clocks, matched exactly, setting one in a plane to fly around the world, and another motionless, waiting for the return of its partner. When they reunite, the one that traveled rests milliseconds behind the one fixed. The faster you move, physicists have found, the less you experience time. And if you move at the speed of light, you will never age; you are outside of time; you are an eternal creature.

But before you strap on your running shoes, you should know scientists warn us that with speed, matter increases in density, so an attempt at the speed of light will have you imploded by the time you hit Wichita, your atoms as dense as bowling balls. And to make matters worse, your density increases on a curve; the faster you go, the greater the density, and though you can get close to the speed of light, matter and that magic speed can never meet. The faster you go, the steeper the trajectory on the graph. You and I, made from molecules, cannot travel at the speed of light and cannot escape time, at least not with a body.

Consider the complexity of light in light of the Hebrew metaphor: we don't see light; we see what it touches. It is more or less invisible, made from nothing, just purposed and focused energy, infinite in its power (it will never tire if fired into a vacuum, going forever). How fitting, then, for God to create an existence, then a metaphor, as if to say, here is something entirely unlike you, outside of time, infinite in its power and thrust: here is something you can experience but cannot understand. Throughout the remainder of the Bible, then, God calls Himself light.

(I should give credit where credit is due. This photo was not taken in China, but rather in Tanzania. Mwanza, you are beautiful.)