Sending the light

Second of a series based on photos taken in Kaua’i, the Hawaiian islands.

A postcard perfect sight, a classic lighthouse grips a cliff above the Pacific Ocean near the north shore town of Kilauea. It’s a few miles east of the island’s famed, steep and dangerous NaPali coastline, where huge cliffs plunge right to the sea. Only the brave and fit venture to hike the trail that links the ends-of-the-road on the north and west sides of Kuai’i. Tourists who can afford it take the helicopter tours along the picturesque, wild coast.

The lighthouse reminded me of Jesus’ proclamation in John 8:12:

I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
It also brought to mind three well-known hymns and Gospel-songs about our spiritual Lighthouse.

 “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” by prolific Gospel musician Philip Bliss, was inspired by a sermon he heard evangelist D.L.Moody preach in 1871. Moody told a story of a ship approaching the harbor on a dark, stormy night.  The captain saw a light from a lighthouse. But no lower lights, which would mark the way into a harbor, were lit.  The pilot missed the channel into the harbor, and the boat wrecked on the rocks with much loss of life.  Moody appealed to his audience, “Brothers, the Master will take care of the great lighthouse! Let us keep the lower lights burning!” In other words, keep showing the way to the unsaved.  A stanza of Bliss’s hymn concludes:

Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
Some poor struggling, sinking sailor you may rescue, you may save!

 “Send the Light” came from the pen of Charles Gabriel, whose output included seven thousand hymns. While leading music at a San Francisco church, he was asked to compose a missionary hymn for Easter Sunday. A visiting missionary representative was in the congregation for its debut performance in 1890, and liked it so much he carried it back to the East. Many still know the hymn whose chorus goes:

Send the light, the blessed Gospel light,
Let it shine from shore to shore....forever more.

 “The Lighthouse,” a Southern Gospel-style song, was composed by Ronnie Hinson in 1970 in a most unlikely place: the men’s restroom of a church where he and his siblings were practicing for a concert.  They needed a new song for their concert, and thought Ronnie was kidding when he said he was going to the restroom for some inspiration.  He came back with the words he’d written on a length of toilet paper. The siblings added accompaniment, and the song became a hit. Here’s a strange twist: he had never seen a lighthouse before until later, when he biked thirty miles to Santa Cruz, Calif., and saw the Pigeon Point Lighthouse. For him, it reinforced the hand of God in this memorable song about salvation.

 
Burn the lower lights...send the light...Jesus as the lighthouse: what soul-touching music has risen from the tasks of a beacon tower on a rugged shore