Jesus is speaking during the Feast of the Tabernacles (or Sukkot as mentioned two posts ago). This feast includes lamp-lighting ceremonies, and some people believe that it was in the midst of these lamps that Jesus made his comparison to light. Even if he wasn't, I would expect the correlation was obvious to all who were present.
The biggest problem with this metaphor is that it's lost on those of us who live in the “civilized” world. Light-on-demand is probably one of the most overlooked advancements in history. How can you understand the correlation of light as guidance and protection in a spiritual sense when the real-world connection is often unrecognizable. Can you even imagine what your life would be like without artificial light? It's not just you. The concept is so unfathomable to us that even scientist are studying it. For example, research has been created around literature references to sleeping patterns prior to artificial light. Many documents reference “first sleep” which lasted until about midnight, after which people routinely got up and took care of various tasks or even invited people over before going back to bed. Modern experiments showed that test subjects without light at night naturally progressed to a similar segmented sleeping pattern after only a few weeks. From these results, some doctors theorize that the social effects of artificial lighting has removed us from our natural sleeping pattern which might cause many modern sleeping disorders.
Let me stop here before I go too far off subject. The real point is to acknowledge the far reaching power of light. Now does this change your perspective a little when Jesus says he's the light of life?
If your natural sleep pattern involves as many naps as possible:
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