Reflections of One Small Candle

LIT CANDLES We keep candles in our homes in case of power failures, for prayer or to create a cozy atmosphere or simply for their beauty. Their real purpose is and has always been to dispel darkness and in doing so bring comfort and reassurance to us in physical darkness. We are all familiar with the Christophers motto. It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. In South Africa before apartheid was abolished, people would light a candle and place it in a window as a sign of hope, that one day this evil would be overcome. It soon was declared illegal, as illegal as carrying a gun. The village children would laugh and say, The government is afraid of candles. Things did get better for them as a people with the end of apartheid after the long years of darkness. It is an appalling sense of darkness we encounter whenever there is a diagnosis of illness that completely re-directs our lives and wipes out our plans for our lives as well as our future. If ever there is a time in our lives we need this darkness dispelled it is in this bewildering place. So many of us have given up our loved ones to cancer, but there is a candle lit and it was lit by a doctor at a cancer facility and there is light in his words: