Looking for Some Light

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Lila Joy was born at home a week ago, all healthy and ruddy and dark-headed. I went for a visit Tuesday afternoon, and she was curled near my sister in a patch of sunlight on the bed, not so swollen as she’d been fresh out of the womb. It had been dark then, and the house had smelled like birth. But now, the curtains were all drawn back to fill the room with January light, and she craned her neck to have a good look at it all. When I cupped her against my chest, she bobbed her head back and opened her little mouth. Her new eyes mirrored the window light, and she winced like it hurt. The sun must be terribly bright after the womb, I thought.

But still, she craned toward it.       

It was an afternoon of sixty-two degrees, so I drove home with the window down, sun and hair in my eyes, singing with Colony House that Everybody’s looking for some light.{i}

I think we ache for it more in winter. We emerged from a hard freeze over Christmas, cringing in the sunlight like citizens of the Underworld in The Silver Chair, who had never seen the sunlit lands— like babies used to the womb. Winter’s light tends to be the delicate, dull kind. Most days, it doesn’t fill the curtains or golden my windshield, and I have to go looking for it.

But the beautiful thing is that I’m not the only one, that everybody’s looking for some light, that the eternity in our hearts makes us ache for the Sunlit Lands— even if we know it’ll sting our eyes.

John 1 says that the true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world (John 1:9), which doesn’t mean everyone will come to the light, but that it does fall on the good and bad alike. The Light of the World is not greedy, but generous. Sometimes, it sears through our retinas, like Paul on the road to Damascus. Other times, it is as delicate as a baby in a bed of straw.

Either way, it is there for the looking and the seeing.

I left Lila on the sunlit bed and came home for an afternoon walk. My neighbor was out with his Corgi, and over its yaps, he yelled, “What a nice day!”

The skies were clear, and I agreed.

He pointed over his shoulder. “I don’t believe it, but there’s one little dandelion bloomin’ over by Mrs. Lynch’s mailbox!”

Just to be sure, I bent over the mailbox when he’d gone to behold a cluster of gold bursting from the dead grass and gravel. Were it April, the dandelion would’ve been lost in a sea of green and gold. But here in January, to our newborn eyes fresh out of the womb, any light is a generous grace.

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{i} Colony House. Leave What’s Lost Behind. Roon Records, 2020: https://open.spotify.com/track/4ttkvJlp71n7iNznPSuzH7?si=1f8aa08b82054ad6