The Thames at night was a ribbon of black ink, swirling under the glow of streetlamps. Abena barely noticed it anymore. Once a promising artist, she now spent her days in a cramped office cubicle, designing soulless adverts for products she didn’t believe in. Her flat in Shoreditch was cluttered with half-finished canvases, all shadows, no light.

One rainy evening, while waiting for the Tube at Embankment, an elderly busker played an old hymn on his violin. The melody tugged at something deep within her. As she dropped a coin in his case, he smiled and handed her a scrap of paper: “For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light.” (Psalm 36:9)

Abena tucked the verse into her coat pocket, but the words wouldn’t leave her. That weekend, she wandered into St. Paul’s Cathedral, not to pray, but to sketch the dome’s architecture. As sunlight streamed through the windows, painting the marble floor in gold, she felt it a flicker of something she’d thought long dead.

A priest noticed her staring. “Magnificent, isn’t it? Not the building, the light.” He nodded at her sketchbook. “You capture it well.”

Abena began waking before dawn, walking along Regent’s Canal with her paints. She painted the way the sunrise turned the water to liquid amber. The way frost glittered on bare branches like scattered diamonds. The way an old man’s face crinkled when he laughed over his morning coffee.

Her coworkers noticed the change. “You’re…lighter,” one said.

Abena smiled. “I finally found my palette.”

A year later, Abena’s “Urban Lumen” series debuted in a small gallery near Covent Garden. Each piece was a study of light, how it pooled in puddles after rain, how it caught the edges of pigeons’ wings, how it shone through the cracks of a homeless woman’s cardboard shelter.

At the opening, the busker from Embankment arrived, violin in hand. As he played, Abena whispered, “Thank you.”

He winked. “Don’t thank me. Thank the Light.”

Psalm 36:9 reminds us that God isn’t just in the light. He is the light. Abena didn’t need to escape her world to find beauty; she simply needed new eyes to see the radiance already there.

Darkness is just light waiting to be noticed. Let God adjust your vision.

Heavenly Father, open my eyes to Your light in the mundane, in the broken, in the ordinary miracles around me. Where I’ve grown dull, reawaken my wonder. Where I’ve settled for shadows, flood me with dawn. In Jesus Name, Amen.