(I got this story from church several Sunday nights ago. It’s long, but definitely worth the read.)
There once was a woman who was always running into things. Low-hanging tree branches, big rocks, not so big rocks, furniture, walls.
And she wasn’t alone. She lived in a town filled with people who, every day, would walk around stubbing their toes, hitting their heads, and getting poked in the eye.
The problem, you see, was that in this particular town there was no light. Not a flame, not a bulb, not a moon, not a sun—no light anywhere. Darkness everywhere.
The perpetual darkness caused many problems:
For one, it was nearly impossible to see obstacles in the road and so everybody was constantly tripping and colliding and bumping. People bandaged wounds daily—either their own or those of people they loved.
They frowned, even cried, as they wrapped the bleeding toes and arms and knees, knowing it would likely be just a matter of hours before they suffered yet another injury.
The only consolation was in knowing the accident hadn’t been deadly. Better to live to bandage another wound than to die, as so many had and would.
In addition to all the cuts and bruises, there was also the problem of the shakes.
In a town with no light there’s no heat. Every spot—inside or outside, all day, every day—was a chilly 41 degrees.
No glowing embers to warm one’s hands beside, no open flame to gather round, no spark of electricity to produce warmed air. Just a constant chill resulting in stubborn shivers plaguing every man and woman in town.
And all of this added to the unfortunate reality that without light, there is no color. No purple sky at sunrise, no brilliant orange on translucent butterfly wings, no mossy green patches clinging to the trunks of elm trees or rich crimson smeared across a cardinal’s
breast.
No paints, no rainbows, no color at all.
Every day the woman, the protagonist of our story, found herself meandering through a collage of blacks and grays—her world a vague muddle of ashy shadows and silhouettes. Bleak, but made bleaker by the sad truth that she had no idea how bad things were—
because she had never experienced anything different.
Until one day, when she met a curious man while walking in the dark.
She was on her way to shop the shadowy aisles of the local market, minding her own business, when she stopped suddenly. There, right in the middle of the path, was a bonfire—she, of course, didn’t know that’s what it was, because she had never seen
one. But she was seeing it now, seeing—truly seeing—for the first time—light. More accurately, she was seeing because of light.
The flames cast flickering rays that revealed a man standing beside them.
At first she stood before him open-jawed, unable to look anywhere else, as if he were the only person in the world. He was, to be sure, the only person she had ever truly seen.
The light from the fire brought his face into full view, pushing the darkness away from his cheekbones, eyebrows, temples, and lips, making every nuanced expression visible. Un-ignorable.
As she surveyed his face and clothing, she found herself mesmerized by…color. She certainly didn’t know what to call it or how to describe it, she just knew that it seemed as if her eyes had awakened from sleep—as if she was experiencing a 3rd dimension for
the first time—yellows and blues and oranges and reds and greens—each color different, some lighter, some darker, some warmer, some cooler. Those terms were the best her brain could do—outside of these words, she had no words—no way to articulate what she
was seeing. Only absolute confidence that it delighted her.
The fire’s warmth, too, was brand new and delighted her even further.
The man greeted her.
“I have something I want to give you,” he said. With that, he pulled out a small velvet bag and emptied its contents into the woman’s no-longer-shivering hand. Out tumbled 3 matches. The woman glanced up at the man’s face. “These,” he told her, “are mine. But I want you to use them.”
Having, of course, never seen a match before, she asked, “What are they?”
The man pointed to the fire beside them. “These give birth to that,” he said, smiling. He then explained how that heat and light and color flowed from this one precious resource, and said she was to use these matches to build fires for her friends and neighbors and for all the townspeople. He told her to keep the fires with care and assured her that the fires could birth as many more as they needed—so that the entire town could soon be bathed in light and warmth and color.
With that, the man and his fire were gone and the woman was left clutching his matches.
She began walking home, and as she approached her house, a neighbor called to her from his porch, asking to borrow an extra blanket. When she got closer, she could see that he was holding his newborn son. The child was healthy, but even in the darkness, she saw his tiny lips quivering, bundled though he was, from the cold.
Immediately, the woman’s thoughts darted to the matches she held. One stroke of one of these small wooden sticks and this young family’s life would be altogether different. But just as she took the breath to speak, she stopped short.
What if she lit the match and wasn’t able to make a fire? What if a gust of wind blew just as the match ignited and promptly snuffed it out? What then? Her supply would be diminished by a full third. Fear gripped her heart like a vise. “No,” she thought. “Better to wait. Better not to risk losing a precious match just yet.”
She went to bed that night with the matches under her pillow, feeling a peace that she’d not felt before, secure in the potential of her new-found resource. She pulled her many blankets up to her chin, shivered, and closed her eyes.
The next morning, she woke to a knock at the door. Throwing on a robe, she made her way carefully through the dark house to find her mother standing outside on one leg, clutching her other foot and crying out in pain. She had stepped on a large piece of glass
and was bleeding profusely. “Mother!” the woman said. “I didn’t see it,” was all her mother could manage before breaking into tears.
The woman brought her mother inside and the two huddled together on the couch, trying to stop the bleeding and find any glass left inside the wound. This, of course, was hard to do in the dark—but wait! She had almost forgotten about the matches! She ran back to her bedroom, pulled the velvet purse from beneath her pillow, and stopped.
This wound was serious, yes, …but was this really the time to take measures as drastic as using one of the matches? And she was inexperienced at making fires—who was to say she’d even be successful. Much better to have the matches than to lose them. Sure—
the man had assured her that the warm, bright, colorful fires they produced could produce more fires….but what if he was wrong? Who was to say that’s how it worked?
She carefully placed them back on her bed.
Satisfied with her cautious prudence, she went back to help her mother, doing the best she could, both women shaking from the cold.
A week later, the woman had begun to feel a certain kinship with the matches. She’d taken to carrying the velvet bag in her pocket with her at all times, touching it every so often to ensure it was still there, both reassured and nervous every time she felt it.
This continued for an entire month, when finally the woman decided it was dangerous for her to be carrying around such a valuable resource.
Determined to protect what was hers, the woman made her way to the woods at the edge of the town. And there, at noon, in the thick darkness, her fingers trembling from the chilly air, next to a black tree in the black ground, she dug a deep hole, and buried the matches.
“Now,” she thought to herself, “they will be safe.”
***
(how often do we bury our “matches” only to find that they have been ruined due to lack of use? I challenge you this week to share your “matches” and light with the world around you. We all could use some warmth from Christ.)
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%5B4%5D.jpg "Drama Pool Party (1)")
