The LightThe Light

Part One

Too Late Again

The rescue you keep seeing in the rearview

You have seen it before. Maybe more than once.

The thing works out. The job comes through at the last possible second. The person you needed calls the very day you break. The money is somehow there when the bill is due, and you cannot explain how. And afterward, in the quiet, some part of you goes still and whispers a thing you would never say out loud. That was Him.

But here is what you have probably also done, because I did it for most of my life. You noticed it too late. You only saw the hand after it had already let go. And instead of worship, what rose up in you was closer to grief. If He was there the whole time, why did I have to be so afraid? Why did I spend all those nights certain no one was coming? You saw the light, but only in the rearview mirror, and by the time you turned to look, it already felt gone.

So you stopped looking. You decided the light was for other people. The ones with more faith, or less mess, or better timing. You told yourself that if God were really there, He would show up before you needed Him, in a way you could not possibly miss, and since He never seemed to, you quietly filed Him under maybe. You are not angry, exactly. You are just tired of arriving late to your own rescue.

I know that reader, because I was that reader. I stopped praying altogether. I told God, and I meant it as a dare, that it would take a miracle for me to ever believe in Him again.

Here is what I have learned since, and it is the whole reason I am writing this to you. You were never late. He was never gone. The light was not withheld, and you did not miss your one chance at it. The truth is stranger, and far kinder, than that. The light had already gone ahead of you. It was there before the dark. It was there in the dark. It is the reason you are still standing here to read this at all. You only ever saw it looking back, because that is almost always how it works, for almost everyone. Recognition comes after the lesson. That does not make it too late. It makes it a beginning.

Because a person who can finally see the light behind them is a person about to start seeing it beside them. And one day, further up the road than you think, you will feel it ahead of you, and you will trust it before you can see where it leads.

You hem me in behind and before. You laid your hand on me.— Psalm 139:5 (WEB)

Behind, and before. He was already on both sides of you.

Part Two

The Light on the Wall

Both times He came for me, He came first

Both times He came for me, He came as light. And both times, He came first.

The first was December of 2024. A few days earlier, my wife Raine and I had been on a cruise, in a season of closeness I have never fully been able to explain, a connection where I could feel what she felt and sense her before she spoke. One night, in the hot tub, laughing for hours, I felt the air between us change, and I asked her what she was thinking. She was thinking about the one thing I had never conquered: twenty-four years of a pornography addiction. And she asked me, gently, to promise I would never go back to it.

I couldn't. I told her the truth. I'm human. I have promised that a thousand times and broken it a thousand times. I cannot promise you something I have never once had control over.

A few days later I was home, lying in the bath, and the light coming in between the blinds and the window sill was brighter than I had ever seen it. Nearly blinding. I stared into it until I closed my eyes, and even then I could still see it, burning through my own eyelids, and I looked into it the way you look into the eyes of someone who loves you. And out of me came six words I had never once managed to say. God, I can't do this alone.

And I heard Him answer. Not in the air. In my chest. If you think I can give you the power to control Raine's body, what makes you think I can't give you the power to control your own?

That was all it took. Twenty-four years fell off me in a single breath, and I have never carried it again. I had spent my whole life begging Him to take it. He was waiting, the entire time, for me to hand it over. And He announced Himself as light before He did a single thing.

Seven months later, He did it again. I was in that same bath, in the middle of the hardest conversation of my life. On the ledge sat a cheap battery candle, a little bulb and a bit of plastic flicker, nothing holy about it. And in the middle of a sentence, its reflection, a faint line of light in the crease where the tile met the wall, began to grow, and then to move, sliding along the wall and swelling toward my face, until I pulled my head aside to get out of its way. Raine stopped. What are you seeing? she asked. And I said, Jesus just made Himself known in this room.

Here is what I understood only later. My whole life I had mistaken reflections for the real thing. But a reflection cannot reach for you. Only the Light itself does that. He was not hiding in the reflection this time. He was stepping out of it and coming straight at me, minutes before the darkness fell, because He wanted the last thing I saw before the dark to be Him.

Yahweh is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?— Psalm 27:1 (WEB)

He came first. He always comes first.

Part Three

He's Always Gone First

The pattern hiding in the oldest stories

Once I had eyes to see it in my own life, I started seeing it everywhere else. Especially in the oldest stories.

We read the Bible as history, something that happened to other people a long time ago. But I have come to believe it is not mainly a record of what God did. It is a portrait of how God is. And over and over, He does the exact thing He did in my bathroom. He goes first. He shows up as light before the rescue, not after it.

When God called Moses to go free a nation of slaves, He did not send a memo. He came as fire, a bush that burned and was not consumed. Light, before the deliverance.

Yahweh appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the middle of a bush.— Exodus 3:2 (WEB)

When those freed slaves were finally out in the wilderness with nowhere to go, He went ahead of them as fire. Read this slowly, because it is your whole life in one sentence.

Yahweh went before them by day in a pillar of cloud... and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light.— Exodus 13:21 (WEB)

He went before them. And when the enemy was bearing down at the edge of the sea, that pillar moved and stood between His people and the army chasing them, all night, light to them and darkness to their enemies, before the water ever opened. The light stood between them and the thing that terrified them, before the rescue came.

When a man named Saul rode down a road with murder in his chest, certain he was right about everything, God did not argue with him. A light from heaven flashed around him and put him on the ground, and only then came the voice, the new name, the whole new life.

Suddenly a light from the sky shone around him.— Acts 9:3 (WEB)

This is not a coincidence, and it is not a trick of storytelling.

God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.— 1 John 1:5 (WEB)

He does not arrive after the dark to clean it up. He is already there, going ahead, because light is simply what He is, and light always gets somewhere before you do. So carry this question into the rest of these pages: if that is who He has always been, in every story, for everyone, why would He be any different in yours?

Part Four

It's Not Always Light

He goes ahead of you in a thousand forms

Now I have to save you a lot of looking in the wrong direction. He does not always go ahead of you as light. Sometimes He goes ahead of you as a lawsuit.

From 2020 to 2023 I owned a small Jeep rental business. It ended in the worst way I could imagine: a renter drove one of my Jeeps straight through a river and destroyed the engine, and not one insurance policy would cover it. I hired a lawyer. It cost me fifteen thousand dollars and two and a half years of my life, fighting a battle I never asked for and hated every day of. I won the settlement, finally, right at the end.

And then I got laid off from my job.

Here is what I could not see while I was cursing that lawsuit. That settlement, the money from the fight I resented most, is what I lived on for the next six months, when I had no income at all. The thing I was sure had ruined me was the thing God had set in motion, years before, to carry me through a valley I did not yet know was coming. He was going ahead of me the whole time. It just did not look like light. It looked like a wrecked engine and a lawyer's bill.

And sometimes He goes ahead of you as a person. When Raine came into my life, she had one non-negotiable boundary: zero tolerance for pornography, because she knew firsthand how dark it is. And I was a man with a twenty-four-year addiction to it. Sit with that. The one woman I would give anything to keep had drawn her hardest line in the exact place of my deepest weakness. It looked, at first, like the worst possible match. It was actually the most precise mercy of my life, because the only way to love her the way she deserved was to finally let God take the one thing I had never been able to put down. Her boundary was not in my way. It was the shape of my rescue. And He had arranged it before I ever walked onto that patio and saw her.

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.— Romans 8:28 (WEB)

So do not spend your life only scanning the horizon for a bright light. You will miss most of how He works. He goes ahead of you in a thousand forms, and light is only the one you happen to be able to see. Sometimes it looks like a closed door, a hard boundary, a bill you cannot believe you have to pay. All things. Not only the shining ones.

Part Five

You See It Looking Back

Recognition after the lesson, not signs before belief

Now the most honest thing in this whole reading, the thing that will either frustrate you or free you, and I hope it frees you.

You are almost never going to see the light while you are in the dark. You are going to see it afterward. Looking back.

I want to be careful here, because I am not telling you to become a person who hunts for signs, who won't take a step until God gives a private fireworks show first. That is not faith. That is fear wearing a religious coat, and I lived a version of it. When I finally walked away from the religion I was raised in, I stopped praying altogether, and I threw a dare at the ceiling. I told God it would take a genuine miracle for me to ever believe in Him again.

He took my twenty-four-year addiction.

But I did not see it as the answer to that dare when it happened. I connected the two much later, looking back, and realized He had answered the exact challenge I hurled at Him, in the exact currency I demanded. Recognition came after the lesson. It almost always does.

So I stopped asking for signs before I would trust Him, and I started doing something else. I started noticing. Catching the little lights after the fact and giving Him the credit out loud. And something I did not expect happened: every time I recognized His hand behind me, it got a little easier to trust His hand ahead of me. Hindsight, practiced often enough, slowly becomes foresight.

That is exactly what the Light Log at the end of this reading is for. Nothing fancy, just a running record of the lights you would have missed. Each day, three questions: What did I notice today as light that I normally wouldn't have seen? What happened that I would once have called luck, or timing, or coincidence? And where, looking back, do I now see His hand that I couldn't see in the moment?

Part Six

A God Worth Worshiping

Turn around and see how much was already lit

I grew up believing in a small god. He stood at the top of a hill with His arms folded, watching me climb, waiting to see if I would earn my way up to Him. He kept a ledger. He was, mostly, disappointed. And I spent forty years exhausting myself trying to become worthy of a god who was always just barely out of reach.

That god does not exist. I was handed him, and I believed the lie for most of my life.

The God who actually showed up, the One who came as light on a window and a candle and a lawsuit and a woman's boundary, who went ahead of me every single time and then waited, patiently, for me to hand Him what I could not carry, is so much larger than the god I was afraid of that I do not have words for the difference. And here is what finally brought me to my knees, not in fear this time but in worship: I will never understand Him. Not fully. Not in this life I've been given. I will never reach the bottom of what He can do, or the end of how far ahead of me He has already gone. A God that vast, that kind, that far beyond me, is not a God to earn. He is a God to worship.

So this is the invitation, and it is the opposite of the one I grew up with. I am not asking you to try harder to deserve the light. You cannot, and you were never meant to. I am asking you to turn around and look at the trail behind you, and start seeing how much of it was already lit. Because a person who can finally see the light behind them starts to see it beside them. And one day, further up the road than you think, you will feel it ahead of you, and you will take the step before you can see where it leads, and you will not be afraid, because you will finally know the character of the One who always, always goes first.

He is not waiting at the top of the hill. He is already down the road, holding the light, looking back over His shoulder at you. He has been the whole time.

Yahweh will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory.— Isaiah 60:19 (WEB)