A Brief Candle (Part 1)

 

I love candles.  I love making tea light candle holders and special lantern holders just to have a reason to light more candles in my home. My love for candles was created long before the exotic scented candles had become popular.  My earliest memories of smelling burning wax go back to those days when a storm knocked out our electrical power in our home.  Instant darkness. A quick scramble for the kitchen drawer that held the candlesticks and the matches. Seeing that candle flicker to light brought immediate relief. As more candles were lit more shadows were dissipated.

So I have always been baffled by some people's tendency to blow out other people's candles so that their candles would burn so much brighter. A current internet meme is:

“Blowing out someone else’s candle doesn’t make yours shine any brighter.”

In a purely pragmatic sense, this statement is true.  The amplitude of the light of a single candle does not increase as other candles in a room are extinguished. The intensity of the light does not change solely because it is the only lite candle in a room. 

And yet … the perceived reality is different. In real life, no one is going around with an illuminance meter to measure the lumens that a singular candle gives off.

People are truly thankful when someone enters a pitch-dark room with a candle. Some individuals are so narcissistic that they have to be the only candle burning in that dark room.  They have to be the center of attention.  They have to be the ones noticed.  The “savior” of the situation.  I always wanted to be the first one to go to the kitchen drawer when the power went out in our home.  To be the first one to pull out a candle and lite it. But I also delighted in handing out more candles to my daughters, and my wife so that we all could brighten a room together with our candles.

But not everyone thinks that way. Some individuals refuse to hand out candles and wouldn’t even consider trying to light your candle if you brought one into the room with you. And if you came into the room with a lite candle, they would try to blow yours out so that theirs would burn brighter.

If a person is successful in pursuing this “base purpose” of extinguishing other lights, let's say in a church environment so that his lite candle is the only one remaining, then his candle will be the only one noticed as it illuminates the area around it.  And he will get all the praise for lighting up the room for all to see what is around him.  Most people are so thankful that a candle is lit that no one asks about the absence of other lite candles in the room.

In this case scenario, this one lit candle is truly brighter than all the other candles that have been blown out.

Living with “personally minded” people in my life who genuinely believed that if they blew out my candle then their candle would burn brighter. 

My book, For Pastors Only: Dealing with Rejection in Ministry, is a memoir of my life centered around the theme of rejection. How to cope with it.  How to deal with it.  How to overcome it.  How to learn from it.  Even how to benefit from it to help others through negative life experiences.