The Speed of Light

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

– John 8:12

Nicknamed The Greatest, three-time heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was known for his lightning-fast punches. “I'm so fast,” he once bragged, “that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.” 

Ali’s quickness was legendary, but he was obviously exaggerating. The actual speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, which many physicists believe is an unsurpassable barrier. And what does that kind of speed look like? A few years ago, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) answered the question by filming a laser beam at 10 trillion frames per second passing through a bottle of milk. And as depicted in a 2019 YouTube video produced by The Slow Mo Guys, the resulting footage showed photons streaking through the milk in a blue blur as the laser traveled across the screen. Milk molecules helped scatter the photons in the laser beam, much like how clouds of cosmic dust diffuse the light from otherwise-invisible stars.

So far racking up more than 39 million views, this remarkable footage sheds new light on long-held notions about the universe. Likewise, the teachings of Jesus illuminate the distorted — but long-accepted — ways of the world against the perfection of God’s Kingdom. For example, society teaches us to beat the competition, climb the corporate ladder, and keep up with our neighbors (and then leave them in our dust). We always need the biggest, the fastest, and the shiniest. And most of all, it’s not bragging if we can back it all up.

But Christ teaches something quite different: 

His followers are the light of the world. And to be first, we must be last. 

That’s a revolutionary perspective that’s unacceptable to most people these days. And that’s just the point. After all, how much better would the world be if we were to convey this idea by adopting a servant’s attitude and putting the interests of others before our own? The Bible reports that in the early days of the church, it was a contagious message that spread like wildfire. Thousands of people were baptized and began following this remarkable movement known 2,000 years ago as The Way.

What about for you and me today? 

It all starts by accepting Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior. Moreover, we must embrace the fact that we’re nothing without him — and we can do even less by ourselves. But when we fully surrender our lives to Christ, it’s through this brilliant point of light that we can find our true purpose and play our role in advancing God’s Kingdom, one person at a time.