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For several weeks now, we’ve been lighting candles on the wreath. First one, then two, then three and four. Finally, on Christmas Eve, we lit the Christ candle at the very center and we’ve been lighting it since. Soon, we’ll surround the wreath with bubble wrap and pack it away with all the other Christmas decorations, but the candles won’t get packed.

The candles have been well used throughout the season; they have served their purpose. When our children were little, one of them suggested that perhaps we shouldn’t light the candles. If we didn’t light them, they would always stay nice looking, they would remain even in height, and we would be able to keep them from year to year. The thing about candles is, that unless you’re willing to light them, they’re not really candles.

Our advent candles do look and smell pretty, but candles are first and foremost about light. Wax and wick do not a candle make. Wax and wick become candle when the wick is allowed to burn. A candle is made for burning. Until lit by a flame, wax and wick are only possibility. Until lit by a flame, wax and wick are preserved, intact, unchanging, and remain only wax and wick. Until lit by a flame, wax and wick do not serve their purpose.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” It is a song I sang as a child, and it is a truth I try to live today. This little light, this inner radiance, is your Christmas gift to me.

“O God, help me accept your gift with a grateful heart. Help me move daily to a better understanding of how precious this gift is. Let my hope in you be like oxygen to this little light that it might be fanned into a bright flame.

Help me remember you have claimed me and called me that I might give witness to the light of your love by sharing that light with others. I pray that your light in me will never be “extinguished, quenched like a wick.”

Let the light of your love shine out from me like a searchlight into deep, dark crevices that are void of hope and joy.

Help me to find ways to bring a message of peace to those I encounter this day that together, we might come to “know and believe…and understand” that you are God and you are love.

It is in the burning that a candle shows its flame and it is in loving service to others that your light shines through me. Help me to burn brightly with your love, O God. Amen.”