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Unbenanntes Dokument
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or The Light of The World
It was a beautiful spring season, just shortly after the Berlin Wall of Communist East Germany had come down. After years of dictatorship we had gained freedom and liberty. With this came our freedom to travel. One of my first journeys took me to Israel to get to know the land of the Bible. I wanted to see the places where Jesus had proclaimed the kingdom of God, remember his sacrifice for me on the cross while standing at the foot of Calvary, and to rejoice in His glorious resurrection as I would marvel at the empty Garden Tomb near the city gates of Jerusalem.
At the end of this amazing tour we came to Eilat, a beautiful southern city of Israel at the Red Sea, for a few days of pleasure and recreation. Intrigued by the amazing underwater world the Red Sea has to offer, I took a crash course in scuba diving. I was so fascinated by the beauty of the fish and plants tooming along the coral reefs that I decided to descend even deeper into this beautiful world by embarking on yet another adventure; - a trip with a submarine.
Minutes later, I saw the surrounding ragged mountains of Egypt and Jordan disappear as water quickly crept up along my window and we descended into the depth of the sea. I was excited and anxious to shoot some amazing underwater photography with my brand new camera. With freedom had come new technology to East Germany and being a passionate spare time photographer, I had saved a long time to be able to finally afford a better and a little more advanced reflex camera. I had not yet fully memorized the entire manual, but simply remembered most of the functions by the little colored dots next to the many different buttons. But I was about to learn an even more valuable lesson of physics and optics and its "spiritual application" as we descended deeper and deeper into the sea.
Then, suddenly, in majestic silence, the coral reefs appeared before my eyes. It was a gray dark blush mass of rocks, corals, plants and fish, but in the presence of the spotlight of the submarine the most beautiful colors and bright life appeared. I got my camera ready while trying to find the little colored dots for all the right settings, but they had gone, - simply disappeared. A little surprised I looked at my neighbor, his face looked pale, his lips were gray and colorless. As I looked around me, at my camera, into the colorless faces next to me and the gray-bluish coral reefs outside the submarine, I realized that we were so deep by now, that all colors had simply faded away.
The explanation to this phenomenon was simple. The deeper we went and the more depth of water the sun had to penetrate, the less intense it's light became, thus the less colors we could perceive. It was common physical knowledge but I had taken it for granted and never really thought about it much.
Things are not just blue, red, green and yellow on their own. It takes the right amount and intensity of light to make their colors appear and become visible to our human eye. There in the depth of the sea I experienced the practical application of those physical principles. The more we distance ourselves from the life giving light of the sun, the more we will sink into a world that remains pale, gray, bland and colorless.
If we would have gone even deeper all the way down to the bottom of the sea, we would have entered a world where no sunlight would reach us at all anymore. A world of freezing cold water and total darkness. But there would still be creatures living down there, small fish and some plants, maybe even some still undiscovered species. I wondered what they would think if I told them that there was a sun up there that gives warmth and light. A sun that makes colors appear, turns darkness into bright light, and that without this sun they would not exist since this was the very light that gave them life.
Some would maybe be glad to hear such good news. Others would probably start to laugh at me and call me a fool for such a belief. After all, they have come around quite a bit in their world and have never seen a sun, never felt it's warmth, never seen it's light, never marveled at the colors of a beautiful sunrise, and by the way have managed quite well to live their lives in darkness without ever needing a sun nor its light to exist. To believe in such sun would only deserve their mocking and ridicule, as it would simply be a foolish thing to do.
As well educated people we, of course, know so much more than the little simple-minded creatures on the bottom of the sea. Of course there is sun, and we all know that without it and its light, life would not be possible and no single creature would ever exist. But when it comes to our relationship with God, we often tend to feel and think like an octopus on the bottom of the sea. "There is no God" say many of us, "There cannot be a God. After all, we have never seen him, never heard him speak to us, never experienced his transforming might, never seen his light, or felt his love and power. We lived our lives without him just fine and never needed his love or faithfulness to exist. To believe in such a God would simply be a foolish thing to do."
This is the world without colors that even many of us live in. But how can we find the light? I would not be able to prove the existence of a sun to the creatures living on the bottom of the sea. I could only witness to them that I have seen it, felt its warmth, saw its bright light and experienced the beauty of colors that surrounds my life in the presence of this magnificient bright shining sun. In the same way we cannot prove the existence of God to those who simply can't believe in him. We can only witness of his love and faithfulness that we have experienced in our lives. And we can invite them to find out if it is true by embarking on the journey themselves to surface to a higher level of life, to dare this step of faith to leave behind their cold, gray world of colorless darkness to stretch out to the bright shining light of the Son above.
But even we, as Christians, find ourselves so often sitting at the bottom of the sea, doubting the love and faithfulness of our Heavenly Father above. In Moments where God may seem far away to us or we wonder if he is even there, when doubts or uncertainties, trials or tribulations come our way, we shall know that it is Him who has given us life and who loves us. He can change our darkness into light, our nights into days, our gray, pale doubts into a bright hope for His love and faithfulness, Salvation and Eternal Life.
All we have to do is to embark on this journey, this step of faith to set out to find God once again. And then we, ourselves, will surface from the bottom of our sorrow into a new dimension of life and faith that will leave behind our doubts and uncertainties and bring us into the glory of God's Son who is the light of the world that gives us life.
May God richly bless you and keep you strong in faith and spirit.
Michael Furchert <><
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