Light Still Shines

My house was more tarted up than usual this Christmas. Despite my inner puritanism with its distrust of the season’s popish name and pagan origins, I felt a greater need to be seen to mark it. Almost opposite my home, a former Christian church is being converted to a mosque; I wanted its new proprietors to know that there were still devotees of the Lord Jesus in the vicinity. As well as the usual array of gaudy, flashing lights, which several of my neighbours also troubled to display, I paid forty pounds for an illuminated Bible text:

The Word became Flesh

Space prevented further explanation or reference, but it was a good start. Perhaps some would be minded to do an online search to see from where the strange words came, or it may have struck a chord with those attending carol services.

Truly, the land grows dark. Squalid and empty secularism, the once defining characteristic of late-twentieth-century Britain, now jostles with Islam to be the current century’s potent, national force. Both bode ill for the gospel, for they equally deny it, claiming my above-quoted scripture an impossibility. Secularists (unless communist) tend to ignore and sideline Christians; while in the minority, Islamists offer statements of respect and concord, though these are quietly dissolved when minority status is exceeded. So deck the halls while we may, and light the candles while we can. I fear the West is going the way of Byzantium and most of the Middle East, but throughout history, there have always been pockets where light still shines.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. John 1:5