This Little Light Of Mine
/It’ll probably show up on your permanent record
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So, are you using your little lantern to illuminate ideas that need illuminating? No? I didn’t think so. Well-meaning illumination isn’t at all popular.
Suddenly switching-on the lights scares the cockroaches, and annoys all those relaxing comfortably in the darkness.
“Let your little light shine” is a clarion call to truth-telling. The rub is there’s little agreement on truth. Don’t expect congratulatory slaps on the back for telling the truth.
Shining light on truth will most likely get you a black eye. A lot of people don’t even believe there is such a thing as truth. These people think, “your truth, my truth, and so on”.
High-handed lantern-shining, annoys them.
Still, maybe you should shine your light anyway.
It is true - that success is valued, and failure is laughed at.
So what?
Neither Don Quixote nor Alexander the Great gave a fig for what people thought. They had a job to do. Committed people have a mission that seriously displaces any irrelevant concern over what people think.
I’m reminded of a scene in African Queen in which Humphry Bogart’s character, Charlie Allnut, answers Audry Hepburn’s rebuke for some nasty thing he’s done, by saying, “Well, It’s only natural”.
Hepburn’s character, Rose, replies by saying, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put on this Earth to overcome”.
And there it is . . .
Letting your little light shine is curiously more important than success at illuminating. Valor impresses even when success has been waved away as now, less important.
Worldly success blows away with the wind.
Doing the right thing shows up on your permanent record.
Doing the right thing is tough. Don‘t give me that “your truth, my truth” stuff either. You know perfectly well what the right thing is. You’ve always known. You’ve only pretended to be bewildered.
God isn’t impressed by success. God is impressed by gumption.
Let your little light shine!
By K. L. Shipley
Website: https://www.eclecticessays.com