(Give us light, O Lord.)
---bhajan, northern India
Give it to me, baby.
Give me all your 4's (Go fish).
Give me patience, and I want it right now.
Give me all your money, and nobody gets hurt.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
Gimme.
We love the word. We use it early and often. To be fair, sometimes we are doing the giving, and that is a really good thing. But in this prayer from northern India, the pray-ers are asking---Give us light. We want it. What you have, Lord. Light of the world. Light for all time, or just the light that might get us through this present darkness. We yearn for that light, beg hungrily for it during our shadow seasons. And we maybe don't care if we sound grabby and greedy when we do the pleading. Our gimmes are that overpowering, and the dark is that, well, dark-ish.
Yet here's the thing. The prayer for light---Give it to us, Jesus---turns out to be not so selfish after all. Because the gift of light is sort of like Oprah's big car giveaway. Just one person can't get the light. Nah, light doesn't work that way. See, if you are sitting beside me? and you get light? guess what? That same light lights me up, too! And I can hear Oprah exclaiming, "YOU get a light! and YOU get a light! and YOU get a light!"
Because when light shines in this life, it lights up the whole place. That's the way light is. It's a gimme.
Thank God.
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