Light in the face of Christ

Picture dawn breaking, not over a landscape, but inside a person. The first words God ever spoke over the formless dark were let there be light, and the universe answered. Paul takes that ancient morning and says something staggering: the same God, the very One who commanded light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts. The light He kindles there is the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. A new creation, a personal Genesis, dawn coming up behind the eyes of someone the wilderness had left in the dark. And there is a visible effect to this seeing. The psalmist watched it happen to ordinary people and wrote it down: they looked to him, and were radiant; their faces shall never be covered with shame. Faces that had been hidden, lowered, ashamed, lifted toward the light and began to shine with it. This is where reorientation finally comes to rest. Not in solved problems or tidy answers, but in worship recovered, the renewed sight of a glory the long disorientation had dimmed. To find your bearings again is, in the end, to see Him again, and to be changed by the looking.

The surest sign that your bearings are coming back is not that your circumstances have untangled. It is that you can worship again, that the glory of God in the face of Christ has light in it for you once more, where for a long season it had gone gray and far away. Worship is not the last chore on the list of the rebuilt life. It is the restored delight at the center of it, the thing all the new bearings were pointing toward. So look to Him. Lift your face, even now, even if it has been a face of shame through the whole wandering. The promise was written precisely for you: those who look to Him become radiant, and their faces shall never again be covered with shame. You do not make yourself shine by trying harder; you shine by looking, the way a face turned toward the sunrise simply catches the light it did not generate. Turn your face back toward the light. Let the dawn that broke at creation break again, quietly, inside you. That is the rest-point. That is home.