Hymn

"Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy"

The lighthouse was lit. The lower lights were dark. And a ship full of souls never made it home.

In the 1870s, the evangelist Dwight L. Moody told a story to a crowd in Chicago about a stormy night on Lake Erie.

A steamboat was trying to come into the harbor at Cleveland. The pilot could see the great lighthouse burning at the top of the cliff. But to safely land, he needed more than the lighthouse. He needed the lower lights — the smaller lamps along the shoreline that marked the safe channel into the dock.

On that night, the lower lights had gone out.

The captain asked the pilot, "Are you sure this is the harbor?"

The pilot answered, "Quite sure, sir."

The captain pressed: "Where are the lower lights?"

The pilot looked out into the dark water and said softly, "Gone out, sir."

The ship missed the channel. It struck the rocks. Lives were lost.

Moody finished the story with a line that has never left the church:

"Brethren, the Master will take care of the great lighthouse. Let us keep the lower lights burning."— D.L. Moody

In the audience that night was a hymn writer named Philip Bliss. He went home and wrote a song that we still sing today:

"Brightly beams our Father's mercy
From His lighthouse evermore,
But to us He gives the keeping
Of the lights along the shore."— Philip Bliss, 1871

This is the forever business in one verse. God's mercy is the lighthouse — steady, eternal, never failing. But the small lamps along the shore? Those are us. The kindness. The good word. The bracelet on the wrist that sparks the conversation that changes a stranger's day.

You don't have to be the lighthouse. You just have to keep your light on.