The Lighthouse Keeper of Point Reyes

For twenty-three years, the lighthouse at Point Reyes, California, cast its beam across the Pacific — until 1975, when the Coast Guard automated the light and the keeper's cottage went dark. Within months, ships reported the beam growing unreliable. Salt corroded the unmaintained lens. Fog signals failed. Fishermen along the Marin coast, who had depended on that steady flash for generations, found themselves navigating blind through notorious waters.

It took a community of volunteers, desperate enough to petition Congress, to restore what had been neglected. They scrubbed the Fresnel lens by hand, repaired the clockwork mechanism, and lobbied until the station received proper funding again. The night the restored beam swept across Drake's Bay, old fishermen wept on the docks.

This is the cry of Psalm 80. Israel had known what it meant to live under the steady light of God's favor — the Shepherd who led them like a flock, whose face shone upon them with salvation. But now that light seemed to have gone dark. Their bread was seasoned with tears. Their neighbors laughed at their stumbling. And so the psalmist pleads with an almost desperate repetition: "Restore us, O God Almighty; make Your face shine on us, that we may be saved."

It is the prayer of anyone who has known God's nearness and then felt the terrifying absence — not asking for something new, but begging for the return of a light they cannot navigate without.