Somebody Turns Off a Switch
The word for Thursday, September 10, 2026 is Somebody Turns Off a Switch.
The anchor verses are Jeremiah 8:7 and Proverbs 3:27.
The Gateway Arch has been dark every night since the first of the month.
Not closed. Its exterior lights are simply off. The National Park Service leaves them off through September and turns them back on the evening of October first. The Arch began going dark for migration season in 2002.
The reason is birds.
St. Louis sits along the Mississippi Flyway. About forty percent of the nation's migratory waterfowl use the Mississippi River corridor, and more than three hundred bird species use the flyway. Across North America, about eighty percent of migratory bird species migrate at night, using the night sky and other natural cues to navigate.
Artificial light can interfere with that journey. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warns that nighttime lighting can attract and disorient migrating birds. Birds can circle in the light, burn energy they need for migration, and become more vulnerable to collisions. When birds are trapped around bright light, turning it off for fifteen or twenty minutes can be enough to let them disperse and return to normal behavior.
At the Arch, the intervention is even simpler.
Nothing gets built. Nobody feeds a bird, repairs a wing, or puts up a shelter.
Somebody turns off a switch.
A six hundred and thirty foot monument stops shining for thirty nights. Birds passing over St. Louis do not know who made the decision. They do not know there was a decision. They simply meet a little less artificial light on the way through.
One dark monument does not solve the problem. The skyline still contains glass and artificial light. Birds will still collide with buildings during migration. Turning off one landmark is not the same thing as fixing a city.
It is still good.
Jeremiah says something about birds that lands as an accusation against his own people.
Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming.
The names vary a little across translations, but the point does not. Migrating birds keep their seasons. Then Jeremiah turns toward Judah: but my people know not the judgment of the LORD.
He is not praising birds for moral insight. He is exposing people who have forgotten what should have been clearer to them than migration is to a bird. The creatures keep the pattern of their coming. GOD's people have stopped recognizing what HE requires.
The other line on this card moves from knowing to doing.
Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it.
The good is within reach. The hand can act. Proverbs says do not hold it back.
Nothing in the sentence requires applause.
Some good is addition. A meal appears. A bill gets paid. Somebody shows up at a door.
Some good is subtraction. A light is turned off. A hazard is removed. A cruel sentence is swallowed before it leaves the mouth. A habit that was hurting somebody stops.
That last kind can disappear almost completely from the record.
Nobody gets thanked for damage that did not happen.
The person protected by your restraint may never know there was anything to be protected from. The person whose cost you quietly carried may never see the account. The relative you keep calling may never understand how many times you almost stopped.
Recognition is not what makes the good good.
Proverbs puts the weight somewhere else. Is it good? Is it within your power? Do not withhold it.
That is a smaller test than the ones we usually invent. It does not ask whether the act will be noticed, whether the whole problem will be solved, or whether the recipient will ever understand what your hand did.
GOD knows.
You do not need the bird to look down. You do not need the person on the other side to know every cost. You do not need a receipt from the harm that never arrived.
This does not resolve the larger problem. The Arch lights return October first. One monument going dark does not make an illuminated city safe for every migrating bird. There will be collisions this autumn, and there will be losses nobody intended.
What holds is smaller.
For thirty nights, one thing built to shine is left dark.
And somewhere below all the language about impact and recognition is a hand with enough power to do one good thing.
Proverbs says do not withhold it.
Somebody turns off a switch.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who stopped doing the thing that was hurting somebody, never announced it, and will never be thanked for what did not happen.
- 🙏 To the people who chose to leave a landmark dark for a month so birds passing overhead would meet a little less artificial light.
- 🙏 To the one who has quietly carried somebody else's costs for years and has begun to wonder whether any of it registers anywhere.
- 🙏 To the one who has one good thing within reach today, small enough to be missed and real enough to matter.
Grace and Peace.