What I Learned From the Light From a Bathroom Fan.

I was feeling sorry for myself the other day.

Then  I noticed light. 

In the bathroom at my mother-in-law's house something glowed dimly on the wall. Her bathroom is very dark, with no window to the outside. But today a circle glowed there. 

 On the side of the wall about a foot from the ceiling is the circular vent for the bathroom fan. The light was so bright outside that it shone in the fan grating. There was nothing on the wall there above the potty but the light shining from outdoors, beckoning through the fan grating.

I thought, "Whooee a sunny day," and went outside to bask in the sunlight.

On vacation recently,  Roger and I slept in the basement of a beautiful house up in Lake Placid.  We got settled in on Sunday evening and laughed as we opened the blinds.  There wasn't much to see from our beautifully curtained window. It looked out into a basement window well.

The next day we discovered a deck had been added over the window well. A flight of stairs led up to the ground under the deck, an  alternative in case we couldn't use the hallway right outside our door. We also saw that a spacious deck connected to the house right above our heads.  We could see grass about five feet away if we looked sharply to our left. 

The next day the window got lighter at dawn.  Every tiny space between the deck boards let in some diffused light. The light at the side of the deck even found its way into our hidden window. It was weakened, only a pale reflection of the glorious summer morning that lit the world beyond the deck.  But, wonder of wonders, there was light that turned our window from black to a soft light gray.
 
The light just shone.  It found a way past the deck boards. The sunlight shone through the vent into my mother-in-law's dark bathroom. The light found a way to do what it does. It just kept shining. It didn't pull back from the window well or the fan grating because it couldn't do much there.

Some of us are able to be the summer morning and some of us are able to be the diffused light of the window well. But don't you think all of us are able to shine?