When the Lights Came Back to Aleppo

In December 2016, after four years of relentless bombardment, the ancient city of Aleppo fell into an eerie silence. Entire neighborhoods sat in total darkness — no electricity, no streetlights, nothing but rubble and shadow. Families huddled in basements, unable to imagine that morning would ever feel safe again.

Then the ceasefire held. And slowly, impossibly, people began to return. Syrian engineers worked around the clock to restore power grids. The night a single string of lights flickered on above the old souk marketplace, a crowd gathered in the street. Some wept. Children who had never seen their neighborhood illuminated stood wide-eyed, tugging their mothers' sleeves. Shopkeepers swept broken glass from storefronts. A baker fired up an oven that had been cold for three years. Families arrived from Lebanon, from Jordan, from Germany — carrying whatever they could, drawn back not by logic but by the ache of home and the rumor that light had returned.

That is the scene Isaiah paints. A people crushed by exile, sitting in deep darkness, suddenly told: "Arise, shine, for your light has come." And the prophet says something astonishing — the light does not just comfort those who remained. It draws the nations. Sons and daughters stream in from far away. Strangers arrive bearing gold and frankincense.

The glory of the Almighty works like that first string of lights above a ruined street. It does not merely illuminate. It summons. It pulls the scattered home and turns mourning into an irresistible gathering.