Shine bright

I recently moved to NYC. After seven years of dreaming and hopefully planning, my life has finally landed where my heart has always been. I am home, and it feels this way in every sense of the word. I feel so fortunate that God has placed me in a city of such abundance, and paradoxically, need. Being here offers me the opportunity to watch the world go by—the people as they experience their ordinary, extraordinary lives. It is really a miraculous thing, to know that not one passerby is not known and loved by God. I am so sure of this truth that every time I witness an act of goodness, I am moved to tears because it reminds me so surely that God is in this city.

Even in the places where it seems that God is so surely not to be. In the places of darkness. Greed. Loneliness. It is so easy to get caught up in the shadows here, in the things that are not instead of the things that are. For instance, I live in the South Bronx. I have a giant, dark, ugly fence on my window that was placed there to keep things of the outside world from getting in. It is there for my protection, but so often it feels that it is there for my imprisonment. I look at it and am reminded of all the bad this world has to offer. In the same thought, I am reminded of all the ways in which I have built my own fence up, a personal fortress from which I can carefully plan and protect my heart from any harm.

And no one is exempt from this caged-in reality. We build fences because they work. So well, in fact, that we reinforce our fences unknowingly. We get confused and listen to the wrong people, to the ones who are well meaning but undeserving of such power. In our effort to be loved and accepted, we make an exception for those that speak to us in familiar ways. Those that can confirm our own ideas of ourselves and the world around us, whose love makes sense to us. And we don’t even know that we have traded the things that are for the things that are not. We have traded in our light for darkness, and we are comforted by the familiarity of the shadows. We don't know how to reach the things that are because the things that are not scream louder. We stop challenging and become complacent, and our fence becomes commonplace.

And so our fences remain, constant reminders that our lives must stay small in order to survive this incredibly unsafe world.

But what if our safety comes from within? What if our walls, broken and repaired in our own fashion, can be rebuilt? Can be made into something beautiful and just as strong? Can become instruments of light in a world that is begging for healing? In places that are waiting to be restored? Can transform from the thing it is not to the thing it can be?

In an effort to change my fence into something beautiful, I have chosen to decorate it with lights.  I didn’t take the fence off, leave it as it was, or ignore it. I engaged it for something beautiful. And in the same way we must choose light through the acknowledgement of the darkness. We don’t escape the things that are not by simply acknowledging the things that are. We have to know what it is we are fighting. To name it, to call it by what it is. And then, when we are ready, we grasp hold of the light and refuse to let it go until we are beautiful again. We fight. We are resilient.

We shine so bright that the darkness has no option left but to surrender.

And so our fence, old, rusty and effective at reminding us of who we are not, becomes the thing that leads us to what we are—lights that were never meant to be dimmed in the face of darkness.