Sometimes, We Light Candles

“Cause baby, you’re a firework, come on let your colors burn…let’m go awe, awe, awe, as they shoot across the sky-ay-ay…”

A couple of years ago, Katy Perry’s song, Firework, was one I turned up the volume for when I was in the car. I liked its message of throwing off whatever was keeping you from being yourself. However since then, I have begun rethinking my attachment to it. Thanks to a conversation I had about a year ago with a young leader, I am realizing that using a firework to describe ourselves, may be too short-lived of a metaphor.

Sitting, catching up at a table outside Starbucks, I asked this leader about how things in her ministry were going. As she began to piece together an answer, she admitted she was struggling. My first thought was that she was exhausted and burnt out, as many people in ministry often are, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, she was feeling the opposite.

Being in an entry level position at a missions organization, there were meetings that she thought she would be a part of, things she thought she would get to do, and a place at the table that wasn’t being opened to her yet. She had all these great ideas and gifts, and she had thought she’d be able to use them right away. But rather than pulling out the old cliche, “Ministry is a marathon, not a sprint,” I felt another image begin to take place in my mind as I listened.

When she was finished, I said I think we sometimes make the mistake of believing that we are supposed to light bonfires (or fireworks), when really we are supposed to light candles. Then I started to unpack what I meant, and I began by talking about our culture.

Perhaps more than in any civilization in history, our culture puts an incredible emphasis on creating super stars—human fireworks or bonfires, if you will. One’s fifteen minutes of fame seems more valuable than seventy years of good living. A person will put out a song or movie, or do something cute on youtube, and all of a sudden they are everywhere—on the news, in your Facebook feed, on the radio, etc. Depending on how they trend, they will be in our faces for twenty-four hours to two weeks. How these people handle fame at such a massive yet often short-lived level, I don’t know. But I do know they have skewed our definition of success.

They have made us believe that we have to be BIG and Bright to really “make it.” This has caused us to think that if we aren’t “Big and Bright,” we aren’t accomplishing very much.

Bonfires need a lot of wood to keep blazing, and Fireworks last only seconds. Humanly speaking, they either take a lot of effort or very little. And they don’t necessarily add up to success or a life well-lived. Lighting candles, however, falls in between the effort for a firework and a bonfire, yet can often have much more wide spread results.

Lighting candles looks like building positive relationships with those you lead and those you follow. It looks like seeking to make things better where you are, not just trying to get to where you want to be. It means taking the time to tend to your own flame and working on becoming a person worth following.

As I explained this to the young leader, I told her she was currently doing the most important thing. She couldn’t quantify the impact she was making on the students she worked with nor the experience she was gaining. I said overtime, some of us do light bonfires, but often it’s the candles that last the longest. At the end of our time together, she seemed encouraged. What I didn’t realize though was that I too, was soon to be encouraged similarly.

Just a few weeks later, this leader invited my husband and I to a banquet for the ministry she works with, and as she had been one of my students when I was in ministry, we weren’t going to refuse. Sitting with her at her table that night, she introduced me to some very important people—her students. Then she introduced me to another staff member who had been one of her previous students. I had mentored my student, she mentored this young woman, and now this young woman was mentoring more young women. Candles.

The thing about lighting candles is they multiply. You don’t ever quite know where they all go; sometimes they go far and you feel like you are still the only candle in the dark. But they are out there, lighting more candles. If you aren’t lighting up the sky with a bonfire or a firework, but you are lighting candles, you are not small. You are not a failure. You are a success. You may never see the full breadth of your impact on this world. You may never be trending on the internet. But your impact will be real, and it will last.