The Lighthouse at Cape Bonavista

Margaret Rowe spent forty-one years climbing the seventy-six steps of the Cape Bonavista lighthouse on Newfoundland's eastern coast. Every evening at dusk, without exception, she lit the lamp. Blizzards in January. Fog so thick in August you could taste the salt. The night her husband Samuel died of pneumonia in the keeper's cottage below, she still climbed those steps. Fishermen twenty miles out at sea never knew what it cost her — they only knew the light was there.

Her grandson asked her once why she never missed a night. Margaret wiped her hands on her apron and said, "Because the dark doesn't take a night off, and neither does the light."

James tells us that every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. That phrase — no variation or shadow — is the language of astronomy. Stars shift. The moon waxes and wanes. Even the sun casts longer shadows in winter. But the Almighty is the one light source in the universe that never flickers, never dims, never turns away.

Margaret Rowe was faithful for forty-one years. God has been faithful since before the first star burned. Every answered prayer, every moment of unexpected grace, every good thing you have ever received has come down from the same unwavering source — the Father of lights, steady as eternity, shining still.