If you have lived through a long power cut after a storm, you know the sound. It might be the fourth night, or the ninth. The street is dark except for a few torches and the glow of someone’s generator. Then, without warning, the fridge shudders into life, the fan starts turning, the verandah light blinks on, and from every house on the road comes a shout. Children run outside. Somebody’s radio is suddenly very loud. Across the gully you can hear the next district cheering too.
It is one of the happiest sounds in Caribbean life, and it always seems to come suddenly. One moment dark, the next moment light.
Sudden to us
Of course, it isn’t really sudden. Somewhere, for days, linemen have been working in the heat, clearing fallen poles, restringing wires, testing circuits one by one. The light that bursts into your kitchen at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night is the end of a long, slow process you could not see from where you sat.
Scripture has a way of describing God’s help that feels similar. Psalm 112 speaks of the upright person and says, “Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness” (Psalm 112:4, KJV). The Living Bible paraphrases it vividly: when darkness overtakes him, light will come bursting in. From the inside of a dark season, the turn often feels sudden. But the psalm places it within a longer life of faithfulness, generosity and trust.
What we do in the dark
The most interesting part of a long outage is not the moment the lights come back. It is how people live in the days before.
Some households hunker down alone. Others discover their neighbours. The family with the gas stove cooks for three houses. The man with the generator runs an extension cord over the fence so the diabetic lady next door can keep her insulin cold. Teenagers who have not spoken to an adult in months sit on the step playing dominoes with the old men by lamplight. Someone drives into town and comes back with ice and batteries for the whole road.
It is worth noticing that Psalm 112 is not only about waiting for light. It is about how the upright live while they wait. The same psalm says of such a person, “He is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous” and that he “hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor” (Psalm 112:4, 9, KJV). The light rises for people who are already, in the darkness, being generous.
The other kinds of dark
Not every darkness in a home is caused by a hurricane. Some households are sitting through a different kind of outage: a job lost, a mortgage in arrears, a house damaged and uninsured, a marriage strained almost to breaking, a long illness, a family land dispute that has gone on for years. From inside, these can feel like the ninth night without current. You begin to wonder whether the light is coming at all.
The promise of the psalm is not a timetable. It does not tell us which night the lights will return. It does tell us that darkness is not the final word for those who trust God, and that light does arise. Sometimes it comes as a breakthrough that feels sudden: the job offer, the unexpected help, the reconciliation. Sometimes it comes more gradually, like dawn. Either way, it is usually the fruit of work we could not see.
Being someone else’s lamp
If there is one lesson from a long outage, it may be this: while we wait for our own light, we can be light for someone else. The extension cord over the fence. The pot of soup carried next door. The phone charged at your house for a neighbour whose battery is dead. The call to the elderly relative who lives alone.
Jesus told His followers, “Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14, KJV). He didn’t mean that we would never sit in darkness. He meant that, even there, we carry something others need.
When the cheer goes up
The next time you hear it, that shout from every house on the road as the current comes back, let it be a small parable. Think of the unseen people who worked to bring it. Think of the neighbours who shared what they had while it was dark. And if you are in a longer darkness right now, one no lineman can fix, let the cheer remind you that the lights do come back. Often sooner than we dared to hope. Often, it seems, all at once.
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