Gas Lamp Evangelism

We took a ferry boat from St. Thomas to get to our campground site on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We packed little (cheap) for this guys 'winter' camping trip. The national park there provided cooking utensils and a few other items for our tent site.

One very pleasant surprise was an LP gas tank with a 2-mantle lantern, mounted on a pole beside our picnic table. We learned in a hurry that inky darkness blankets the forested island, especially with no "city glow" from the horizon.

All you had to do was open the LP valve and light a match beside the cracked glass lantern top.

With good humor, we realized that our rusty lantern had only one broken mantle on the dual gas spigot, but we lit it anyway. It glowed reddish orange and cast a few dark shadows within a few feet, but not much else.

The next day we told the park office and by nightfall there were two new lantern mantles on the same crusty apparatus. We lit the mantles and for a few glorious seconds our entire site was bathed in clear, bright light.

Three grown men cheered spontaneously on an island in the middle of the ocean! Hurrah!

Then the lantern sputtered. Then one mantle burned out and the other glowed its same dismal reddish orange from the night before.

It was late, and only a few more days on the island anyway. We could navigate by flashlight. We were also very aware that only a few hundred miles to the north, people were suffering horrendous life and death issues in the earthquake aftermath. Our needs were miniscule.

I went ahead and told the park office, and upon returning to the site later, we found a brand new, shiny lantern with two fresh mantles on our old LP pole. I tentatively placed a match to the globe and cheery bright light spread over our little patch of dirt and tree roots.

What nice fellowship we had at that picnic table for the remaining few evenings. And how much easier it was to see our way around trees, equipment and packs.

You can get by with a dismal red glow and convince yourself that it is sufficient; it may even sputter brightly for a brief moments now and then. But once you see the real Light, you recognize the counterfeit is a poor substitute.

Jesus said, "If the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" Matthew 6:23

What do you believe?