The Sunday Letter
Sometime in the small hours of this morning, while the whole South was asleep, the clocks fell back and the year handed us a rare gift, the hour that March borrowed from us last spring, returned at last with no interest and no apology. It also means that tonight the dark will come to supper a full hour early, and keep that habit all winter.
Misti and I have a simple habit that is one of the quiet joys of our life down here. Of an evening we take a walk through our neighborhood, just the two of us, out in the cooler air with all of God’s handiwork on display, and the evening light down here has a way of making an ordinary street worth slowing down for. All fall, though, we have been starting that walk earlier and earlier, chasing the daylight as it clocked out a little sooner each week. This past week the daylight finally beat us to it. We looked up ready to go, took one glance outside, and found the sun already down and the street gone to dusk, and we very nearly talked ourselves into staying in.
Being Southern, of course, we went anyway. And here is what we found out there. The dark had come, but the light had not gone anywhere. Every house we passed had its lamps lit in the windows, the streetlights were doing their patient work overhead, and here and there a neighbor’s landscaping threw a soft glow across a lawn. Between all of it, the evening was not dark at all, not really. It was lit from a hundred small sources, every one of them somebody being home, and it turned a walk we had almost skipped into one of the loveliest we have taken all year.
I know the early dark gets talked about like a loss, and I understand the complaint. But I have come around on it over the years, and I will tell you what turned me. The dark coming early is the year’s way of herding us toward one another. A June evening scatters a family, somebody is on the mower, somebody is at the ballfield, somebody has gone down to the water, and bless every bit of it. A November evening gathers them back. The same family ends up in the same few rooms, under the same few lamps, around the same pot of something warm, mostly because there is nowhere else worth being after six. Down here winter mostly spares us its hard edges, but it still hands us its best gift, and its best gift is the gathering.
And here is the other thing the early dark does, the thing our walk taught us without saying a word. It gives the light its voice back. Nobody notices a porch light in June. You cannot even tell it is burning at seven thirty of a summer evening. But in an early November dusk, that same bulb, not one watt brighter, carries clear to the end of the street, and everybody who passes it hears what it has been trying to say all year: somebody is home, somebody is expected, somebody left this on for a reason. The light never changed. The dark around it is what changed, and it turns out the dark is what lets a light finally mean something.
So there is an extra hour sitting in your pocket today, the only one all year that arrives free, and I would not spend it on nothing. Spend it at the table, or on the phone with somebody whose voice you have been missing, or asleep, if sleep is the truest thing you need. And when the dark comes early tonight, do not fight it. Flip the porch light on before you strictly have to, call your people into the lit rooms, and put something warm on the stove. And if the cool evening calls you out the door the way it called us, go on and take the walk, and let your own lit-up street remind you how much light a neighborhood keeps once it finally gets dark enough to show. The thermometer down here will swear it is still summer for a while yet. The porch light knows better.
Take a minute with that today. Then go turn your light on.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
All week I have been thinking about how early the lights come on now, and it sent me back to the oldest kept light I know of. Out in the wilderness, before his people had a temple or a city or so much as a settled address, God gave Moses the plans for a tent where he would meet with them. The plans ran on for chapters, down to the curtains and the clasps, and then they came to a lamp, and to what must be the first standing order about a light ever written down.
“You shall command the people of Israel that they bring to you pure beaten olive oil for the light, that a lamp may regularly be set up to burn. In the tent of meeting, outside the veil that is before the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall tend it from evening to morning before the LORD. It shall be a statute forever to be observed throughout their generations by the people of Israel.” — Exodus 27:20-21
Slow down and look at that scene a minute. A tent pitched in the middle of a dark wilderness, and inside the tent a lamp, and beside the lamp a man whose one job, all night, was to keep it burning. Notice the lamp’s hours, from evening to morning. God did not ask for a light at noon. The dark was the lamp’s whole shift, the very thing it was commanded for. And notice that the light did not keep itself. Somebody trimmed the wick and poured the oil and stayed close by until sunup, every night, forever, a statute with no expiration on it. Of everything the Almighty could have ordered kept going in his house, what he asked for was this: when it is dark, there will be a light, and someone will be tending it.
I used to read that as housekeeping. I read it now as a promise with furniture. A lamp burning from evening to morning says somebody is home and somebody is awake, and it says the dark, real as it is, does not get the last word in this house. And David, who spent more nights in the dark than most of us ever will, caves and battlefields both, knew exactly whose hand was on his lamp.
“For it is you who light my lamp; the LORD my God lightens my darkness.” — Psalm 18:28
It is you who light my lamp. Not I keep my own lamp lit, thank you kindly, which is how I would have been tempted to write it. David had learned the thing the tabernacle was built to teach, that the light you live by is tended, and not by you. Through the long stretch between evening and morning there is a hand trimming and refilling and staying near, while you get on with the sleeping or the praying or the plain enduring the night has handed you. A season where the dark comes early is not a season God has wandered off from. It is the lamp’s working hours. It is the exact stretch the light was commanded for.
I will own my part plainly. My habit, when a dark stretch sets in, is to cross my arms and wait it out, eyes fixed on spring, as if the only thing a dark season is good for is being over. I have spent whole Novembers of the soul that way. And I expect I have slept through hours the Lord kept the lamp burning on my account, and never once looked over to see it giving light.
So if the dark has come early where you are, and I do not only mean the clocks, let the old tent tell you what it was built to say. The early dark is not the light failing, it is the reason the light was lit, and the One who ordered the lamp has not retired from tending it. A porch light runs on the same old statute, if you think about it. An early dusk has never been bad news to it, because the sooner the dark arrives, the longer the light gets to burn. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.