In the Spotlight

“All the world’s a stage…” – Jacques in As You Like It, by William Shakespeare

As I prepared last Friday night to enjoy my first experience with Singarama, a wildly popular campus tradition that showcases large numbers of ultra-gifted Lipscomb University students, I was mesmerized by the stage lights illuminating the auditorium in celestial royal blue. We in the audience instinctively knew that the lights were simply teasing us. Before long, they would disappear completely, only to explode again and dazzle us with the glittering magic of brightly-costumed performers singing and dancing and delivering a delightful evening of entertainment.

It is a different experience for those on stage. Blinded by the light, they must remain focused in ironic, light-flooded darkness, remembering the steps, remembering the lyrics, remembering to smile. It is a rush of a different kind, one that arrives by hard work, nerves, adrenaline, and execution. In the end we are all happy, but none more so than those who stepped up and delivered in the spotlight.

I also considered this earlier in the week sitting in the famed Madison Square Garden, the self-described most famous arena in the world, watching another set of college students put on a show in front of a crowd under the bright lights. This time it was athletic talent and a live national television audience, but it necessarily involved the same light-flooded darkness, the same adrenaline, and the same task to focus on what had been practiced over and over.

It was a pleasure on both occasions to watch students stand and deliver under the bright lights.

Some seem to crave the spotlight, while others avoid it. There are reasons to be wary of the spotlight, but others to embrace it. It is simultaneously compelling and terrifying. And some who crave the spotlight never receive it, and others who avoid it who find it thrust upon them.

It isn’t a bad metaphor for life, as might have occurred to Shakespeare.

So how does one respond to an impending moment on life’s stage under the bright lights? Discipline. Preparation. Courage. Persistence. Hard work. Good habits. Resilience. Endurance.

And maybe most important of all, an active imagination that envisions in faith that glorious and transcendent moment when you have done your part and the curtain falls or the buzzer sounds—in the spotlight.