“All it takes is one tiny flame to make the darkness go away,” declared my well-intentioned youth leader as he lit a match in the dark sanctuary. My twelve-year old eyes drifted to the highest black corners of the room. “What about the darkness over there?” I (silently) protested. The small flame brightened faces of the kids sitting to either side of me, but the fact that we were positioned close to the hand that held the match was not lost on me.

I never liked that “light a match and pretend it's Jesus” week in the youth lesson rotation. If Jesus’ love was as big as my teachers claimed, why didn’t it reach more than a few feet away? And what about the fact that the rest of the room was pitch black?

Back then, I hoped this was just a poor illustration and Jesus’ love was bigger than the short-lived “tiny flame” in front of me. I wanted to believe that with Jesus in my life, no darkness would remain like I was taught. What I've learned over the years though isn't that darkness no longer exists because of Jesus, but that there is something bigger than the darkness that's with me always, even when I can't see (or feel) it. A light, a hope, that's never extinguished. 

If I were to teach a similar lesson to kids today, I would swap the match for a few photos of the darkness of outer space. I would explain how scientists have proven there is no such thing as complete darkness--that even in the farthest away depths of space, there is light that never goes away. I would suggest that maybe Jesus calls himself "Light" because he never leaves either. 

Sharing these words of the psalmist, “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you” (139:12), I would remind them that Divine eyes do not see the world like we do. Hopefully, their young minds would understand that what we experience as darkness is something very different to Jesus.