Let Your Light Shine
Day 267 – 24 September
Brighter Towards Noon
But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, That shines brighter and brighter until the full day. (Proverbs 4:18, NASB)
Pencil Marks on the Doorframe
In a great many family homes there is one doorframe that nobody is allowed to paint. Up its edge climbs a ladder of pencil lines, each dated and initialled, each drawn with a ruler laid flat on a small head while its owner stood as tall as possible, heels pressed to the wood. Anyone who has kept such a doorframe knows the curious lesson it teaches, which is that growth stays invisible while it happens and becomes undeniable once it has happened. Between the age of four and the start of puberty a child grows by about five centimetres a year, a rate that works out at roughly a seventh of a millimetre a day, far too little for any eye to catch across a breakfast table. Parents who see their children every morning are usually the last to notice the change, and it is the grandparent visiting at Christmas who exclaims at it. Doctors add a further surprise, which is that much of the growing is set in motion in the dark: the hormone that drives a child’s growth is released mainly during the deepest stage of sleep, so the child measured against the doorframe last spring has done a good deal of their growing since then while lying perfectly still. The doorframe records a progress that nobody saw and nobody strained for, and Proverbs describes the path of the righteous in exactly those terms.
The Path That Grows Brighter
Those terms come in a father’s instruction to his son, where Proverbs sets two roads side by side and describes each by the light it walks in. “But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, That shines brighter and brighter until the full day” (Proverbs 4:18). The very next verse describes the other road, a way like deep darkness where people stumble without knowing what tripped them. The righteous, צַדִּיקִים (tsaddiqim, the righteous, people set right with God who then go on to live rightly), walk a road that is lit, and the light the father chooses for it is the first light of all. His words are כְּאוֹר נֹגַהּ (ke’or nogah, like the light of brightness), and נֹגַהּ (nogah, brightness, the gleam of dawn) names the sun’s first shining as it clears the horizon, the word David used in his last recorded song when he likened a just ruler to morning light on a cloudless day and to grass springing up in the clear shining after rain. A dawn gleam is faint, and it is also entirely real. Anyone standing in the first grey of morning knows that the night is over, even though the day has barely begun, which is the father’s point: a person who has set out on the right road already walks in real light, however thin it looks at first.
Going and Shining
At first is only the beginning, because the father goes on to say what the light does next, and he says it with an idiom that ordinary Hebrew kept for things that increase as they go. The phrase is הוֹלֵךְ וָאוֹר (holekh va’or, going and shining), which says, quite literally, that the light goes and shines. Hebrew liked to yoke its verb for going to a second verb whenever something was growing as it went. When the young Samuel served at Shiloh, the narrator wrote that the boy went on growing, הֹלֵךְ וְגָדֵל (holekh vegadel, going and growing), a doorframe verse if ever there was one; and when Goliath advanced on David, the text says he came on, drawing nearer and nearer. So the dawn on the righteous road goes on shining, brighter and brighter, in the same way a child goes on growing. The verb inside that idiom is the one we met at the start of this week, הָלַךְ (halakh, to walk, to go), the ordinary word for a life’s going, and here it does something lovely: it turns the light itself into a walker, so that the traveller walks the path while the light walks alongside, gathering brightness step by step. The father then names where it all arrives, עַד־נְכוֹן הַיּוֹם (ad-nekhon hayyom, until the day is established). The word נָכוֹן (nakhon, set, established, firm) comes from a root meaning to stand firm, and the phrase describes high noon, the hour when the sun seems to stand still at its height. One old commentator noticed something beautiful in the way the verse ends, which is that the comparison stops at noon. There is no afternoon in it, and no light beginning to fail, because the father was describing a knowledge of God that, in that commentator’s reading, knows no decline. Most of us measure our lives against an ordinary day, with its long slide towards an evening we half dread. The path of the righteous runs on a different clock, whose every hour is later in the morning than the last.
Measured by the Year
Later in the morning than the last is how growth in God usually feels from the inside, which is to say barely at all. Measured against yesterday, most of us look much the same, and a person who audits their soul every evening will often go to bed discouraged. The doorframe teaches a kinder way to measure, which is by the year. Set yourself against the mark from twelve months ago: the temper that flared then and flares less now, the fear that ruled a whole season and has since loosened its grip, the prayer that was hard labour and has become something closer to conversation, the kindness that once had to be forced and now comes more readily. That is the dawn going on to shine. And the growth was never yours to manufacture, any more than a child makes itself taller by straining. In the fuller light of the gospel, the righteous are people set right with God as a gift, and the brightening of their road is the work of the One whose light it is; much of it, like a child’s growing, happens while they rest in Him and notice nothing at all. So this Thursday asks for no heroics. It asks you to keep walking the lit road, to take the next step the lamp shows, and to stop measuring yourself against the doorframe every morning. Let someone who loves you tell you what they see, since they, like the visiting grandparent, will notice it first. And when you lie down tonight, lie down without guilt, because growing in the dark is exactly how growing works. The light on your path has only one direction, and it has been climbing since the day you set out.
Declaration
I rarely catch myself growing, and today I am content to leave the measuring to time. By the hour I look much the same as I did yesterday, and I have spent too many evenings auditing a progress that no single day could show. So I will look back instead, across a whole year, and let myself see what has changed: the anger that burns lower, the fear that has loosened, the kindness that comes more easily than it used to. None of that was forced into being by my straining; most of it grew while I was resting in a love that kept on working. I will walk today’s stretch of road and take the step that lies in front of me, and tonight I will sleep without guilt, because growing in the dark is how growing works. The light I walk in began as a thin gleam, and it has been gathering ever since. The day I walk in is climbing towards noon, and it has never once turned back towards night.
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