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Often, especially when I have trouble getting my writing engine warmed up, a picture prompt can help. So I sat on the front stoop with Max to see if he would cooperate. It was our first selfie together since the beard went away and, while he showed his usual disdain for the Paparazzi, I managed to snag a couple of keepers.

Interestingly, even though my mother has been an adamant anti-bearder, dead set against the fur from the very beginning, she has yet to notice the fact that it has gone! So today I plan to ask her if she still hates it, and see what happens!

Into the Light:

My other approach to the writing doldrums is scripture. So here is a gem from my morning reading. The context is the conversation Jesus is having with a leading Pharisee named Nicodemus.

“This is the verdict,” Jesus says, “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”

John 3:19-21

Words like this, coming from Jesus, stand so powerfully and with such indisputable authority.

For John, trying to capture who Jesus is using words, light is a powerful idea. And we know today, from basic scientific observation to the penetrating reach of tools such as the Hubble Telescope, that light gives us everything from illumination to truth to photosynthesis to energy to the building blocks of all of life.

Light is also invitation:

In Jesus, everything that light represents is personified. And when I stand at the sink in the early morning, holding that first cup of coffee, watching light make its way to the edge of the world, then pouring over the horizon and through the trees into my kitchen, spilling into our home, I am confronted with the invitation to allow such life and power and energy to resurrect me once again, to be born in me anew.

The darkness, John writes at the beginning of his account, has no potency at all in the face of such truth and power.

In Jesus was/is life, and that life was/is the light of all humankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

– John 1:4-5

Truth. Power. Potency. Life. Effectiveness. Light. Jesus.