This little light - of yours

I just walked home from church a moment ago. It is a dark night, and all along the way I was looking at my neighbors' yards. I have just started taking care of my own yard again, and I'm on the lookout for ideas. Well, some of them had landscape lighting systems. "Cool!" I thought.

Some had high-powered spotlights aimed up into broad full-leafed trees, othes had them on the trunks of palm trees so that the entire upper part of the palm was a blaze of light, still other had them washing light on shrubs and even a fence or two. Even at night, I could see the color on the shrubs and fences.

But - some were those solar powered little yard lights which seem to be so popular right now. They use the latest in technology - LED lighting. That's a type of light source which consumes very little power. In fact, I have been told that they don't really use electricity, they just use magic, but I don't know if I buy that...

They are real easy to install - you just buy them, unwrap them and stick them into the ground. That's it - a little solar panel on the top absorbs sunlight all day long, and then when the sensor determines that it is, in fact, night - the light comes on.

Delightful. Except for one minor drawback - they are so wimpy that they do a very strange thing: they don't actually light anything up. I saw one yard which was just covered in the things, and they were all burning as brightly as they could. But I saw nothing in the whole yard except the spots of light from each of the lamps. I didn't see any light cast on the pathway to the front door, I didn't see any of the shrubs or trees lit up, I couldn't even see a pool of light on the ground below the light fixtures. Just happy little spots of light in the darkness, And it was as if they wanted to say, "look at me! Don't bother looking at the tens of thousands of dollars of landscaping and walkways this guy put into his yard, look at ME! Aren't I wonderful?"

OK, maybe they had a better attitude about it than that, but that's the impression I got. I hate to totally trash these things, but they are useless. The picture I posted with this blog shows a nice walkway. But if you look at it you can see that they had to provide lighting from some other source or you would just see a black scene with some spots of light. You would never know there was a brick walkway there.

Well, as I was walking along, of course, it happened. A moment of clarity -I was seeing myself. Jesus told us to be lights, but he specified that, "In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. Matthew 5:15-17

So - we can be lights of the high-quality, expensive kind which actually give light to the world around us, lighting the way, showing the joy available, and keeping those around us from tripping and falling.

Or -

We can be the little wimpy light which simply says, "look at me."