In REFLECTIONS ON LIGHT (Part 1), we looked at the story of the healing of the man born blind. Notice that the man’s sight wasn’t just restored since he never could see. He was given the gift of sight by Yeshua. At the end of the long miracle story, the man utters a memorable sentence: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

In this article, I’d like to tell you a story from my youth. My family lived on a nice street where there were seven or eight other houses on our block. Back in those days, neighbors knew each other pretty well, and they knew each others’ struggles and family issues.

There was a very nice family that lived on our block. Mother, father, and a couple of kids. I will call them Mr. and Mrs. X, though that obviously wasn’t their real name. We knew this family well. They were kind, hard-working, honest people. Salt of the earth.

However, there was a problem, and many people knew about it. The kind, quiet, hard-working Mr. X would occasionally have a drink of alcohol after work with his friends. Apparently, he was one of those people who couldn’t hold his alcohol because after taking a drink, he ceased being like kindly, intelligent Dr. Jekyll and changed to be more like you-know-who. It became known that he would be loud and belligerent with his family, though I was unaware of any physical abuse. Still, such behavior couldn’t have been good for his family, and I knew the children suffered.

I was a small child when I asked my mother why Mr. X yelled at his family. She told me that he was a good man, but he just didn’t realize the harm he was doing. She also told me I should pray that God would open his eyes to understand his problem. I did pray, and I learned that many other people also prayed for Mr. X.

After a time, things seemed to straighten themselves out in that family. I grew up and moved away, but once when I was visiting my parents, my mother related something special to me that she had learned about Mr. X.

It seems that during those troubled years, Mr. X went for a drive. It was a Sunday, and he was alone in his car when he heard a voice. It was the voice of a minister on the car radio. The minister was preaching a sermon about the evils of alcohol, and he said, “If you’re drinking alcohol, stop drinking because you’re hurting your family.”

If you’re drinking alcohol, stop drinking because you’re hurting your family.

Now I don’t know this for a fact, but perhaps Mr. X had been raised in a family where drinking and yelling were common, and maybe he was just following his own father’s example. But suddenly, in the course of that short automobile ride, Mr. X’s eyes were opened to the harm he had been doing to his wife and children.

You guessed it – he stopped drinking. Completely.

Think about it: One afternoon. One man driving in a car heard the voice of a preacher whom he didn’t know, and who certainly wouldn’t have known him. One sentence. And it changed that man’s life, his family’s lives, and who knows how many others.

How could that happen? Some minister sat in a recording studio and his words were turned into radio waves. (Did you know radio waves are a form of light?) Those radio waves floated unseen through the air onto Mr. X’s radio antenna, where they were reformatted into sound waves. And everything changed. An entire family had been saved.

Was that a miracle? I don’t know. All I know is that man was blind, and then he could see.

Words have power, and those of us who write have the ability to use that power to enlighten the world through our work. I pray God will richly bless us in the new year with the humility and wisdom to reflect His light.

How do you use your writing to enlighten others’ lives?