It's Dark

It’s Dark

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"The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned." 

Isaiah 9:2 (NIV) 

It’s dark. 

And it’s been dark so long, I wonder why I even know it’s dark. 

I can’t remember the last time light even touched these surfaces. Or have they always been jagged edges in the shadows? 

Has light ever warmed the air around me so it was easy to breathe, or have I always been heaving? 

Or do I know it’s darkness because it creates this uneasy feeling when the light goes out, and it all starts to fade. Like a full life that empties into a masquerade. 

And it leaves loneliness in its wake. Hopelessness that sticks to the bones and no prayer seems to shake. 

Still in exile, and those centuries of silence from God are becoming deafening. 

It takes faith, but faith is like a depleting resource as each generation shoulders the pain of promises unfulfilled, hope isolated. 

I can feel that generational weight of waiting on a God who somehow feels both distant and just a breath away. 

But I wasn’t born on that side of history, and I hold in my hands something that cannot be taken away from me in the waiting. 

It’s the legacy of a miracle. A miracle that came from a seed, planted in a woman in the middle of a desert that streams of water somehow reached. A seed that sprouted and grew, God’s faithfulness made tangible, His loving hands holding our faces, his eyes of fire bringing light to the dark places.

Because darkness is as light to you, 

And in your presence, darkness becomes as light to me. 

Not because you’ve illuminated what I can’t see, but more that your light takes up more and more of my periphery, 

Coming into full focus. And the love I lost in the darkness is restored to me. The truth confused in the darkness becomes sharp lines I can see. And the fearful awareness that encompassed me while shadows danced becomes something of an anchored clarity, and the shadows become what they always really were: hollow threats, illuminated by my imagination, yet they were nothing but old, worn puppets on an empty stage.

And it’s not resolved, the darkness, but it doesn’t seem to matter as much now that you’re here. 

You have a chest I can rest on and arms that envelop me and words that soothe my every last worry and a friendship like matured wine. You are fun and love and humour and beauty and loyalty and truth and honesty and anchoring all in one person. I lack nothing in you. 

And so, the dark may not turn to light in my lifetime. The wrongs may not be put to rights before I die. The sun may not rise on that broken relationship, that stinging injustice, that story never finished because I ran out of time. 

But you said you would make all things right. And faith in me grows when I see that twinkle in your eye.

So I’m going to try something new. I’m going to lay down my craving to be the author, see the marks in my hands that control engraved now that I’ve handed it over to you.

I don’t want to be like those who handed you over to the Romans because you didn’t look like the imaginary saviour I conjured. I don’t want to worship at the altar of My Will and love it more than yours. 

I don’t want to forsake you because you don’t do what I want you to do. That’s not the sort of love that embodies truth. 

So God I’m giving the pen back to you. And with it, the weight of the story is on your shoulders instead of mine. The resolution and how it’s all going to play out is decided by your mind, not mine. 

And it will all happen in your time. Not mine. I’ll let your light sustain me in this life, and find a glimpse of you in each moment where the fragments start to align. 

Just one of many beautiful plot lines in the story you call life.