such a light
Riley spends her first two days doing orientation course work in a tiny room in the unpresentable behind-the-back-curtain part of the hospital, beyond the helpful forward-facing signs and the corridors frequented by patients and visitors.
She shows me the place several days later, when I walk her into work for her first day training in her actual job, her body turning by memory down back alleyways until we stand, somewhat awkwardly, in front of what looks for all the world like a standard classroom door with a college-level plaque above the chrome handle.
“I don’t think you have to go in there today,” I say, once I realize where she’s taken me, but what I’d been thinking was something like, clearly hardly anyone ever comes down here. This is where she’s been the last few days? Because where this is looks like hardly anywhere, like the where-oh-where or the where-in-the-world, and although she turned down this way by memory, I’ve already forgotten where I am.
I’d have been like the Israelites, disbelieving this place could be the place.
She looks relieved but doesn’t say this, says only, “Oh, I don’t?”
I remember what Kevin said after visiting her here on her very first day, something about how it’s a tiny room, almost closet-sized, how the door vibrates on its hinges. He’d felt a little claustrophobic tucked in there with Riley, a proctor, and two other people in the process of orienting, each of them watching a webinar about benefits on a separate computer screen. He’d walked in and she had glanced up, glassy-eyed after so much screen time, stunned by hours and hours of digitized information. But none of this had inspired any negative commentary from Riley, who had only been smiley and happy in the evening when she got home, enthusiastic and ready to go again the following day.
“No, I think you get to train down in the kitchen and on the floors today,” I say as we drift away from what the hospital has labeled resource room, back down two gray halls and into the thrumming sounds of people and healing and life.
“That sounds amazing,” she says, and later, she will tell me that it was just that.
There’s a place in Paul’s prison-written letter to the Philippian church—I can imagine him pausing to gaze through a house-arrest window at a sky full of winking stars when he wrote this part—when he urges God’s people in Philippi to do everything without complaining or arguing, so that, he wrote, “you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life.”
This was key, then, to a radically revolutionary life, this dare to be dramatically different:
Everything, without complaint.
I had remembered this verse on the evening of day two, when I asked Riley how orientation was going, and she paused–just a beat, one, two–before answering cheerily, “Pretty good!”
Orientation, those two closeted days in front of a computer monitor down in the bowels of the hospital, had not been Riley’s favorite, and yet, given the opportunity to complain in detail, she had, feeling just so grateful for the job, only managed to slightly downgrade the expression of her own positivity.
In real time, God uses Riley to show me what it looks like to practice this freedom, Paul’s Philippian rule of life, because she will almost never say anything negative about her experiences. We’ve learned that “pretty good,” as a downgrade from amazing, means definitely not her favorite, although her tone almost always genuinely conveys gratitude instead of a grumbling heart.
The best blessings—this job, for Riley, certainly among them–come with their own inherent difficulties. That’s the way of it here, in the hinterlands.
In the case of the Israelites and the milk-and-honey land God had promised, there had been trust-hewing battles with fearsome opponents, conquests requiring faith. The people felt so afraid in the beginning they said they’d rather return to slavery. They threatened to kill their leaders. And all of this, all their grumbling and complaining and violence, God experienced as spurning.
I don’t often think of it this way, that my negativity, which usually pours out right after I acknowledge, “now, I know this is such a blessing, truly, but,” isn’t just drama or being real, but also is, at least on some level, a rejection of both the gift and the giver.
Everything, without complaining.
Paul’s promise to the Philippian church, under house arrest and communicating that “what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel,” that this practical choice not to complain facilitates transformation, bringing an integrity to hearts and minds and bodies, a blameless purity which is radiantly beautiful in God’s sight, still applies. Apart from my complaining, I’ll begin to shine like the stars, holding out the Light in my cupped hands, drawing all attention to God, His beautiful, generous glory, and away from myself.
Conversely then, complaint degrades a life, plunging the receiver of my complaints into darkness as they focus their attention on me.
Watching Riley now, beaming, laughing, really, for joy, as we cross a hallway toward the kitchen where she works, toward the heavy doors from behind which come all those smells of food cooking and the busy clatter of trays, the tasting of goodness to come, I see in her that radiance, the shine of an innocent, integral nature, the polish of attention directed, gratefully, toward God.
She’s such a light, people always say of her, such a light.
She’s sunshine, I’m thinking now, as she waves at me, all grins, and goes inside, a reflection of the kind of light no darkness can ever overcome.
