Mr. California and I were having one of our wide ranging conversations on Tuesday night and I was talking about my first job out of university and how I thought I was going to make the world a better place.
The truth is, my current job will never make the world a better place. I like to think that I’m nice, I know I do good work, but nothing I do will make the world a better, kinder or more wonderful place. My work is not life changing.
On the shortest day of the year, I find myself thinking about the return of the light.
As the year’s have passed, I have become more mindful of the change that is this day. I have become more mindful that today is a fulcrum. Less than 8 hours of daylight and minus thirty. Tomorrow marks a change. Tomorrow the days begin to lengthen. So slowly that the change is imperceptible at first.
I won’t notice the return of the light until sometime in March. I won’t notice until I am making dinner and I realize that it is still light out, until I wake up in the daylight and not the dark. It creeps up. I will know, intellectually that the days are lengthening, but I will not believe it for months.
Today? Today I know that the earth moves. It rotates, returns. Things follow other things. The following is a preordained order. Things move as they should. The longest night is nothing more than moving to what will be.
I thought all those years ago, when I was young and foolish, living in the spring time of my life, that life always moved upward, forward, onward. I thought that life and growing up always meant bigger, better, faster, more.
I know differently now. I will not change the whole entire world with my work. I am only one, and a small person at that. My capacity for light, for goodness, for change is limited.
And life, like the longest night, is a fulcrum. Always held in balance.
For I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.
Job 19:25-26
Beautiful verses.
I won’t be changing the world either. Not the entire world. Probably not even a square inch.
But a capacity for light, for goodness, for change? Those things are underrated. You may believe that yours are limited. But they are extraordinary.
And I feel them. Here. On another continent.
I’ve always thought that it is rarely the big things that actually make the world a better place. Instead it is the person who smiles when you are having a bad day or helps you load your groceries in the back of the car. And you’ve made my world a better place.