Most of the ocean has never seen a sunrise.
Water covers about 70% of the earth, and it runs deep. An average of roughly 12,000 feet, which is close to nine Empire State Buildings stacked end to end. Past a certain point, sunlight simply doesn't reach. No dusk, no dawn. Just permanent midnight, all the way down.
And yet that's exactly where some of the most striking light in creation shows up.
Light from the inside
Scattered through that darkness, in certain fish, squid, even bacteria, is a capability called bioluminescence. A chemical reaction inside their bodies produces actual light, glowing on demand in a place that never gets any from outside. God built that light-making ability directly into them, and it does real work down there: drawing a mate through the dark, or startling off a predator that would otherwise never see it coming.
They don't wait for the darkness to lift. They carry their own light into it.
What that looks like in a person
Some days the world genuinely feels dark. Not abstractly, but specifically: a diagnosis, a broken relationship, a headline that makes you wonder how people can treat each other the way they do. That darkness is real, and it doesn't help anyone to pretend otherwise.
But it's not the whole picture. Scattered through that same darkness are people carrying a light that isn't self-generated any more than a deep-sea fish invented its own glow. It's something they were given, God's own character of love, reflected outward through how they live. Not because they've earned some special status. Because it's available to anyone willing to carry it, the same way that light was built into a creature that will never once see the sun.
"Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." (Matthew 5:16)
Look again
Christ said it about Himself first: "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life" (John 8:12). Every glowing thing in that deep, sunless water is a small, distant echo of that light that doesn't wait for better conditions, light that was never meant to depend on the sun in the first place.
You don't have to wait for the dark to lift before you shine into it.
Until next time,
Michelle
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