Strings of Lights

The true light [Jesus], which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.  -The Gospel of John 1:9

Christmas lights have always fascinated me. I still remember the multicolored lights wrapped in live pine roping that were strung across the Lebanon city streets of my childhood, just like the ones in A Christmas Story. I remember my aunt from Maryland, who came each year for Christmas, complaining that they made it difficult to see the red, green and yellow traffic lights. Needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased with her comment! 

As soon as I was old enough to climb on a ladder, I began to hang lights from the roof line of our house, around the windows and on the shrubbery. I bought a home tree flocking kit from Sears, which you attached to the reverse flow of your vacuum cleaner, and flocked our Christmas tree in the back of our kitchen. (If you know anything about flocking a tree, well, you know that the flocking goes on everything around the tree as well as on the tree itself!) I then put white twinkle lights on it, which was a new thing in those days. 

I still love Christmas lights and have always hung and wrapped a lot of them outside and inside of our house, although since we have moved to a condo community, I am limited as to how many lights I can put up outside. At least the inside of our house is still filled with lights. 

Now, I realize that some people view Christmas lights as gaudy and a commercialization of Christmas, but I don’t agree. Christmas is about light coming into the world, the Light of the World. In my opinion there is not nearly enough of Jesus’s light in our world; our world is pretty dark sometimes; especially this year. 

Christmas lights, whether large bulbs or twinkle ones, clear or multicolored, represent and remind me that Jesus’s light is shining in the darkness, just as they represent us shining HIS light in the darkness. This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine! 

-Pastor Bucky