Not generating your own light doesn’t mean you cannot shine. Some of the brightest objects in the night sky produce no light of their own. They simply receive it, and reflect it, and the darkness is less dark for it. I am no one remarkable. I am as caught up in the troubles of this world as anyone — unpolished, unfinished, nothing special to look at. But that ordinariness doesn’t mean I cannot push back against the dark.
There are moments here — more than a few — when I slide into doubt. What can someone like me actually accomplish in a place like this? Will anything in these children change? Will anything in me? Will the day come when the misunderstandings lift — the suspicion that follows an outsider?
It all goes dark sometimes. Every angle at once.
And then I remember: light doesn’t show itself against brightness. It shows itself against the dark. The darker it gets, the more clearly the light is seen. To find, inside my own dimness, a light that does not go out — that is a comfort I can’t quite put into words. If that light can burn inside someone as unlit as me, what darkness in this world could it not reach?
The deeper the night, the brighter the stars.