Starting Right
Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
Starting Right
Light The Town, Light Your Life
What happens when someone tries to dim the meaning of Christmas? A small town in Illinois answered not with outrage, but with radiance—stringing crosses, stars, and manger scenes across porches, trees, and mailboxes until the whole place glowed like a promise you could see for miles. That quiet surge of light becomes our starting point for a deeper question: how do we live as light when the room feels dark?
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right. I am Danny Mack, and I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back and relax for the next five minutes as I help you start your day by starting right. Welconda, Illinois is a small town with a population of about 7,000 people. For 45 years, that town had a tradition of putting two large illuminated crosses on the city water towers during the Christmas season. That was until a lawsuit was threatened against them by the national spokesman for American atheists who fought against having any kind of religious decorations in towns. Because of the pressure and the legal threat of that, the town removed the crosses. But in the year following, the citizens of Wokonda sort of took matters into their own hands. They decided to place lighted Christmas reminders on their own property. All around town, Christmas crosses began to appear in even bigger numbers. They were on lawns, on flagpoles, on telephone poles, on trees and mailboxes. And it didn't stop with just replacing the crosses. There were nativity stars and lighted manger scenes and lighted trees, and all of a sudden the town of Wakanda was ablaze with Christmas lights. In fact, there were so many lights that you could see Wakanda from the interstate freeway. You could see Wakanda a hundred miles away. And all night it was as bright as day because the people decided to turn on the lights. When asked whether or not this response was a protest against the removal of the lights from the water tower, one of the residents said, No, it's it's not a protest. We don't want to put anyone's beliefs down, we just want to show ours. One woman proudly displayed her cross made out of birch branches. She said, I put it up because I believe in God and the birth of Christ. If they don't want to look at it, they can look someplace else. What was meant by the atheists to darken the message of Christmas and God's love became instead a message of light, the light of Christ, far in excess of what it was before. In the Gospel of Matthew, the fifth chapter, it tells us that we are the light of the world. And then in verse 16 it says, Let your light shine before others that they may know your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. We are to be the light of the world, so how can we do that? Well, when I think about our current situation and I think about being light, I think about two fellows who were in lockdown. In fact, they were in the worst kind of lockdown. They couldn't leave where they were, they couldn't associate with anybody else around them because they were in a dungeon. Paul and Silas were locked up in prison. Unjustly, by the way. It was nothing that they had done particularly wrong, other than they had upset some people who were in power. But what did they do in their lockdown? They didn't decry the injustice of it all, they didn't even complain about the food or the sanitary conditions. No, they didn't do any of that kind of thing. In fact, they sat there in the place where they were, in isolation, in the dark, in lockdown. And the scripture tells us that they sang praises to God. Everyone else there was despondent. They were in fear, they were depressed, they were overwhelmed by their situation. But Paul and Silas didn't do that. They said, right here in the middle of this lockdown, we are going to choose to praise God. The people need to see in us the light and the love of God, that we can show that to them by how we respond to the situations that we are in. That's the greatest missionary tool that you and I have right now. How do we respond to where we are? Can we at this Christmas? When maybe we will be in lockdown completely ourselves, not able to even leave our homes unless it's for something essential. Certainly for most of us, our contact with our families and our friends is going to be extremely limited. How are we going to respond to that? How are we going to let our light shine? We have a lesson that we can learn from the people of Wakanda, Illinois. When their lights were taken down, they decided to let their light shine even greater. And you and I have the ability this Christmas time to let our light shine by maintaining our joy, by maintaining our praise, by maintaining our good attitudes in every place that we go. We have the ability to let our light shine to the people around us. Let's avoid the grumble and complain level. Let us step into the rejoice level. I'm going to have a great Christmas. No matter what I can or cannot do, it is still Christmas. And I encourage you all to do the same thing because God is alive and he loves you, and this is a time we can celebrate him and let our light shine for him. Have a great day, my friends. We'll talk again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today. And I invite you to join me Monday to Friday right here on Starting Right with Danny Mack.
