A couple summers ago, my husband and I worked at a summer church camp. I taught a journaling workshop, and I also was a “dorm parent,” offering an extra set of hands to support the lead and assistant counselors of a girls’ dorm. One of the girls in my dorm (I’ll call her TJ) was from a nearby orphanage/foster care home, and I spent the week with her and the others, observing their interactions and remembering how hard it is to be a young teenager.

As part of the daily worship service, the youth could paint and create artwork that would later be sold to raise money for a mission project. TJ made a painting that I purchased at the end of camp. “It’s almost tribal,” the art director said when I bought it. I thought the same thing, but what drew me to the painting were the words at the bottom.

It reads: The light’s is you.

The English instructor side of me wrestles with the grammatical error, but the mystical side allows that maybe the wording error is what makes this more of a koan, a riddle, than a statement of fact. Since the picture hangs in my kitchen, I see it several times a day, and each time, I wonder what it’s saying to me:

The light’s in you.

The lights are you.

The lights are in you.

I don’t know what TJ meant to write, but it’s clear there is a connection between the idea of light and you and me. In this time of pandemic uncertainty, the mystery is how we bring this light to the world.