Do we dare embrace an authentic faith stripped bare of everything that we have spoken into it and ripped entirely clean of everything that we have built upon it? And are we willing to embrace something that inexpressibly potent, that unashamedly demanding, and that shockingly unfamiliar? Yet maybe the better question is, do we dare to not do that?

Without the darkness would we truly understand the light as being light?

We might wish to take note of the fact that it is within the impoverishment of our own thinking that we create these innumerable strategies which we brazenly herald as the means to mankind’s salvation. And the means by which to halt the incessant travesties that this failed reality repeatedly births is to acknowledge the impoverishment of our relationship with the God who has already secured our salvation.

As a kid we would step out on those thick summer nights and collect lightening bugs. And with a mason jar chock full of them, their combined brilliance would light up my hands as I held them. But, if I released them from the jar, their brilliance would light up the world, which now included the hands of everyone around me. And as I think about the light of the Gospel and the utter brilliance of its message, as Christians maybe we should get rid of our jars.