Caring for Light
Survival
There are things you sacrifice when you are born into a culture of unreality.
First, you lose your innocence - not through experience, but through manipulation. You are trained not to see what is right before you. You are taught that virtue is obedience, that doubt is sin, that truth is what the powerful say it is.
Second, you lose your voice.
You learn early that questions are dangerous. That "being good" means agreeing. That speaking plainly is not only discouraged but punished.
Third, you lose your very heart.
You begin to doubt the "still small voice" within you — the one whispering, "This is wrong" — because the world around you demands that you worship its sparkling lies instead.
Survival becomes performance. Sincerity becomes a private crime. You smile, you bow, you fake your way through rituals that drain the life out of you, praying no one sees the despair behind your eyes.
This is the hidden cost of growing up in a false world: exile from yourself.
Firebearers
Against all odds, a few refuse to give up.
They are the ones who listen to the aching truth gnawing at the corners of their minds. They are the ones who, despite the shame, despite the loneliness, choose to stop pretending.
They are the firebearers.
They walk a brutal path. The fire of reality scorches away every comforting lie. Every half-truth. Every hope that the world will someday apologize.
There is grief beyond words in this.
But there is also something else: something stubborn and undying. A deeper self that rises from the ashes, not because it is easy, but because there is no other honest choice.
And so the firebearers walk on.
Transformation
The transformation is not into something superhuman.
It is a becoming of who you were truly meant to be before the world crushed you into a shape it could use.
It is painful. It is slow. It is terrifying.
You learn to see the double-speaking liars without bitterness. You recognize that they are not free. You see the communal narcissism for what it is: a desperate, hollow attempt to replace reality with control.
You grieve for them. But you do not go back.
You refuse to worship unreality.
You refuse to call evil good.
You refuse to burn your mind on the altar of social belonging.
And in doing so, you rejoin the world — the real world — the one of sunsets, of cold air in the lungs, of soil and blood and laughter and grief.
You become fiercely, irrevocably free.
Burnout
Freedom carries its own dangers.
The world of illusion will not celebrate your escape. It will mock you. It will pity you. It will accuse you of pride, of madness, of betrayal.
The temptation to despair will always lurk nearby.
But the answer is not to hide your flame. The answer is to tend it carefully.
You must learn to feed your fire with things the hollow world cannot give: truth, beauty, integrity, courage.
You must protect it not with walls, but with fierce tenderness.
You must recognize that bearing the flame is not about saving the world. It is about refusing to let the world unmake you.
And if — by some miracle — your fire lights another's along the way, then rejoice.
But never make the fire a transaction.
You carry it because you must. Because it is who you are. Because you refuse to be anything less than real.
Let Your Light So Shine
You will walk out under the stars one night, and you will realize that you are no longer waiting.
Not for approval. Not for understanding. Not for rescue.
You are simply there — a breathing part of the vast, aching, unstoppable world.
The old hunger to prove yourself will fade like a bad dream. The old fear of standing alone will melt into the grass under your feet. You will not have answers for everything. You will not need them.
You will know only this:
That you were made for more than pleasing broken kings. That your heart was not a bargaining chip to be traded for safety. That your mind was not built to worship lies dressed in polite smiles.
You will be a quiet, relentless revolution against everything false. Not by fighting for attention, but by living in such raw truth that your mere existence is a rebellion.
A different kind of light will shine from you. Not the harsh blaze of the self-righteous. Not the cold glare of the cynic. But a softer, deeper flame — steady, wild, and impossible to counterfeit.
It will not be a light that says, Look at me. It will be a light that says, Look. See.
And maybe — just maybe — one day, someone else lost in the fog will catch the glimpse of that flame.
And they will remember. And they will dare to wake. And they will carry the fire, too.
Not because you forced them. Not because you preached at them. But because you lit your lamp and did not hide it under anyone’s bushel.
You bore the weight. You bore the loneliness. You bore the cost.
And in doing so, you became the signpost home for a world that has almost forgotten how to read the stars.
You are not broken. You are not lost. You are not alone.
You are the keeper of the flame. And the night is not forever.
If you truly seek to follow Jesus, then the truth will set you free.