The Lighthouse Keeper of Matinicus Rock

In 1853, a seventeen-year-old girl named Abbie Burgess took over the twin lighthouses on Matinicus Rock, a barren granite outcrop twenty-five miles off the coast of Maine. Her father had sailed to the mainland for supplies and did not return for four months. Storms battered the island. Waves swallowed the chicken coop and clawed at the keeper's house. The food ran low. Her mother lay bedridden. Her younger sisters cried through the long nights.

But every evening, Abbie climbed the towers and trimmed the wicks and filled the lamps with oil. She never let the lights go dark — not once in four months. Fishermen navigating those brutal waters later said they never knew anything was wrong on Matinicus Rock. The light simply kept burning, steady as ever, no matter what raged around it.

Malachi wrote to a people who had grown careless with their worship, half-hearted in their tithes, cynical about God's justice. They had changed. Their devotion had flickered and nearly gone out. But the Lord declared, "I do not change. So you, descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed."

The faithfulness of God is not a response to ours. It is not contingent on our steadiness. Like that light burning above the North Atlantic, the character of the Almighty holds firm when everything around it shifts. That unchanging nature is not a theological abstraction — it is the only reason any of us are still standing.