The Light Left On

When Hurricane Katrina swallowed the Lower Ninth Ward in 2005, Margaret Johnson spent three days on her rooftop with nothing but a wool blanket and a flashlight with dying batteries. Floodwaters had turned her neighborhood into a dark, endless sea. She could hear people calling out in the night. She could hear things she never wanted to hear again.

But Margaret kept clicking that flashlight on. Every few minutes, just a brief pulse of light across the water. Not because it could save her — but because it reminded her that darkness had not won. "I kept thinking about my grandmother's favorite psalm," she told a reporter years later. "The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? I decided if God was my light, then I wasn't sitting in the dark. Not really."

Rescue came on the third morning. Margaret was dehydrated, sun-blistered, and sixty-seven years old. When the National Guard pulled her into the helicopter, she was singing.

Psalm 27 is not a psalm written from comfort. David composed it while hunted, while threatened, while enemies encamped around him. Yet he opens not with a plea but with a declaration: The Lord is my light. That is the flashlight click in the darkness — not a denial of the storm, but a refusal to let the storm define reality. The Almighty does not always remove the floodwaters. But He sits with us on the roof, and He is enough.