Less Than Nothing

My nephew introduced me to a clever and interesting YouTube channel, VSauce, where all sorts of ideas and questions are prodded and poked at until answers come out.

Sometimes when I'm puttering around I turn one on because listening to something intelligent feels good on a be-toddlered brain.  And the things they tunnel into are really interesting and unexpected.

This video asks - and answers - how much does a shadow weigh.

In The Great Divorce, CS Lewis writes an allegory of a man traveling on a visit into heaven, where things are so real - so much more real than people - that the visitors are like shadows walking. Blades of grass pierce their feet, because the non-heavenly people are not solid enough to bend the grass beneath them.

In God's High Country, things are solid and heavy and weighty with glory.  Everything else is insignificant and pale, weightless and fleeting and small.

There's this moment when the protagonist realizes he's come up - up - up an immense distance, scaling a massive cliff, which, from heaven's perspective, is a mere nick in the floor, and something in my brain grasps a glimpse of the magnitude of Jesus' willingness to be made flesh.

And I am in awe of - and longing for -  that true realness, that weight of glory.

So when VSauce is asked how much a shadow weighs, the Lewisian answer that came to mind was: less than nothing.

And guess what.

It's less than nothing.

But light - glory - has weight.  On a sunny day, Chicago weighs 300lbs more than it does on a cloudy one.

And I know it's silly but that gives me so much hope.  Sometimes things seem so very dark.  Bad people doing evil things, rhetoric of hatred, entitlement and selfishness and abuse.

But shadows weigh less than nothing.  Insignificant.  Ineffectual.

But the good good news, the glory of the gospel, the light of Jesus can overwhelm that darkness in a heartbeat.  Shadows? Less than nothing.

If darkness looms, let me find my hope in this: shadows weigh less than nothing.
If my heart is heavy, let it be heavy with the weight of glory.
And if I am longing for my true home, let me find it pressed and printed everywhere.

Even on VSauce :).