Headlamps on the Coast Trail

Ten past five and the sea is doing nothing much and there is a gray along the bottom of the sky that is not sunrise yet, and Anwen has been on the trail for forty minutes.

She walks in the dark on purpose. It is not a hardship. She is fifty-two and she has done this three or four mornings a week for eleven years and she is properly equipped and properly experienced, and there is nothing romantic about it: she likes the trail without people on it, and this is when it is.

She has a good lamp. Not a cheap one. She can see about four feet of ground clearly and another six or seven vaguely, and the rest is the shape of the coast on her right and the dark on her left, and she has never once found that a problem.

She is not lonely in it. That has to be understood or none of the rest of it makes sense. She walks with God on that trail and always has, and it is the deepest hour of her week, and if you told her she was missing something she would be genuinely puzzled rather than defensive.

At about twenty past she hears them behind her on the narrow section.

Five of them, a club or a group of some kind, moving at a decent pace, and they come up behind and there is the usual awkward business of a narrow path, and she steps up on to the bank and lets them past, and then falls in about ten feet behind because they are going her way and her pace.

And the trail lights up.

Not brightly. Nobody has produced a floodlight. It is five headlamps at slightly different heights and slightly different angles, all moving.

And Anwen can suddenly see fifteen feet of ground.

She actually stops for a second, because it is so unexpected. Her own lamp is exactly as bright as it was ninety seconds ago. Nothing about her equipment has changed at all.

What has changed is the shadows.

One lamp puts a hard shadow behind every rock and every tussock, because all the light is coming from one place. Five lamps at different angles fill each other's shadows in, and what you get is not more light, it is ground you can actually read.

You have that trail. Yours might not be at five in the morning. But you know your own reason for walking it alone, and you know it is a good reason, and you have probably never had cause to question it.

John offers two options and neither is solitary

The first chapter of John's first letter is about light and darkness, and it sets out the alternatives with a precision that is easy to miss because the sentences are short.

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.1 John 1:7

If we walk in the light, we have fellowship one with another.

Read the consequence he names. Not: we have clarity. Not: we see our own path. Fellowship one with another, which is horizontal, and which he presents as what walking in the light produces.

You are given fellowship as the stated result of walking in the light, and it is written as a consequence and not as an extra. That is the written word and not my correction on a dark path, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence from a very short letter and lays it on a coast trail at twenty past five.

And now look at the alternatives John is working with, because there are only two in that passage and this is the part that matters for a woman with a good lamp.

Verse six: if we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie.

Verse seven: but if we walk in the light, we have fellowship one with another.

Two options. Walking in darkness, or walking in the light with fellowship attached.

There is no third category. John never offers walking in the light on your own as an available position, not because he is against solitude, but because in his account the light and the company arrive together, as one thing.

The shadows, not the brightness

Here is why that is not a rebuke and why you do not have to have been doing it wrong for eleven years.

Nothing in that verse says your lamp is inadequate. It is not. You have walked eleven years and not fallen, and God has been with you every one of those mornings and the depth of it is real.

What company changes is not the brightness. It is the shadows.

Every one of us throws a hard shadow behind the thing we are standing in front of, and it is invisible to us precisely because we are the light source. That is not a moral failing; it is geometry. A person standing at a different angle sees into your shadow without effort and without cleverness, simply because they are not standing where you are.

This is yours, and what another person gives you is not more light but ground you can read, and it is already available. First John 1 puts fellowship one with another as the consequence in exactly that clause, and the same Spirit who bears witness in the fifth chapter of that letter is the one making it a present fact in a woman ten feet behind five moving lamps.

Now let me guard this the way this site guards it.

I am not telling you the eleven years were second best. They were not, and I am not going to insult a woman who has walked in weather most people would not open a door in.

And I am not telling you the answer is to join something. That is not what fellowship means in that verse and it is not what this site says. John is not describing an event; he is describing what happens between people who are walking the same way, which on a coast path is five headlamps and on your road might be one person and a Tuesday.

And if you are reading this and there is genuinely nobody, you are not outside this sentence. The verse is a description of what walking in the light produces, and God is entirely capable of producing it in a life where it has been absent for eleven years, and the first person to name might be somebody you have not thought about in a long time.