Those Who Do Not Come Back

Those Who Do Not Come Back

Good morning.

There's an old fable, told across the bazaars and courts of the East long before it reached a Word document- about a delegation of flies who once came to the King of Moths.

“We fly as you fly,” they said. “We roam the earth, restless as you are. Why should moths carry such a noble name, and we be dismissed as something lesser? Let us be counted among you.”

The king considered them. “Very well,” he said. “A moth has one calling: to seek the light. Go and do that. When you return, we'll see.”

So, they went into towns, villages, cities and found every kind of light there was: candlelight in kitchen windows, lamplight over market stalls, the high orange flare of funeral pyres. And they came back triumphant, ready to report everything they had seen.

The king was waiting, but he was no longer deciding. “The decision was made the moment you walked back in,” he told them. “A moth that finds the light does not return to tell of it. It is consumed by it. You came back. That is your answer.”

Those who find the light do not come back to describe it. They are changed by it, or they never truly found it.

It's a hard story to sit with, especially over coffee before a workday. Most of us are professionals precisely because we're good at going out, gathering what we find, and bringing back a clear, well-organized report. That's not a flaw; it's often the job. But the fable draws a sharper line than “do good work.” It asks what we do the moment we actually encounter something true: a piece of knowledge that indicts us, an injustice we can no longer un-see, a conviction that costs something to hold. Do we let it cost us? Or do we file it, present it well, collect the credit for having found it, and go back to how we were living before?

John 12:24–26

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, and anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be.”

Jesus doesn't describe the seed's death as a tragedy averted by good management. He describes it as the only way anything real gets produced. The flies loved their lives too well to lose them in the light they found and so they stayed exactly what they were, single seeds, unmultiplied. The moths lost everything and, in the fable's strange economy, that loss is the only fruitful ending in the story.

For the Work Ahead

· Notice today where you're tempted to report on a truth rather than let it change how you act, a policy you know is unfair, a number you know is wrong, a conversation you've been avoiding.

· Ask whether your ambition this season is oriented toward being seen finding the light, or toward actually being near it, cost and all.

· Remember that Christ's own pattern was the seed, not the delegation. He did not send a report of the cross back from a safe distance.

So, here's the question worth carrying into your first meeting: when you find something true today about your work, your team, yourself will you let it consume the version of you that walked in this morning? Or will you just bring back a very good account of it?

Lord, make us moths and not flies willing to be lost in what we find, not merely proud to have found it. -Jonathan the Wayfarer

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