Chapter 3 Some Wee Little Man, Part 2

With this Jesus of my imagination now gone, I turned off all of the work lights but one. I climbed back up into my sycamore balcony to watch its solitary beam below me, seemingly alive from what I had just stirred up with my shuffling feet and bad attitude.

Leaning once again against the rusted railing, it struck me that this disease I was questioning is a malady he knows all too well, for a very real infection inhabited the souls of mankind, even as he watched; with a simple betrayal, just one deliberate concession ushered in a broad and sweeping invasion. Seeds of iniquity, with their capsuled capacity for malice were cast upon generational fields to germinate deep within the fertile soul of humanity, hastening our illness and our destruction, blanketing us in a veil of darkness.

But we know there was One who loved much too deeply to relinquish custody and so he entered this time and space—an Illumination who crushed evil’s head with his heel, forming light and fashioning it to bend and proportion toward shadowed corners. And there we were found, clinging to our fig leaves and memories of calculated defiance, our willful and wanton waywardness.

The sacrifice was epic, rendering the war decidedly won two thousand years ago—but battles continued, unrelenting, as if word didn’t quite reach the distant encampments in the nether world.

And so, all of us, each and every one, have been destined to stumble, to choose poorly, to limp for a lifetime, because the defeated will not go lightly.

So, as obvious casualties of these battles, will he still heal us? Will he cure us from this disease—physical, mental, and emotional? What of the bad effects of our bad lives, of those wretched decisions which have disfigured our beauty before him?

I believe he must, and he will, for such is the promise of grace, and such is our need to be purified before the Source of light. But this very light, by my much too metaphorical way of thinking, has invaded and found its shape and hope by illuminating the particles of our refusal, this dust suggesting the origins of our humanity. As if the One from whom all light flows simply acknowledged that this was how He would always go about it: our disobedience right there on display, magnified and highlighted in the beam of His radiation, giving outline and contour—our very grittiness creating a silhouette from which goodness and purity can emanate.

Even here, sitting upon this balcony, the swirling debris of this forgotten porn theater and its associated sickness designs a stage where light can penetrate and dance and find its identity, enlightening others toward the redemption found within these walls.

Perhaps light, without shape, becomes too broad, too expansive. It becomes some unidentifiable essence, some environment lacking true definition.

And so, in the wake of all that we are and all that we’ve done, do we somehow create a place for light to take form? To pierce some stirred up reminder of our creation? Could it be that the healing we thought would make us all better and good and right and moral, all clean and uncluttered to another's eyes, instead was meant to render us forever messy? To be reflected and worn as a badge of honor—to provide an elucidation for someone else, weary and broken like us, who is crawling toward it?

It is a mystery, no doubt, for this wee little man.

And now, maybe you too.