When I was a child I used to be terribly afraid of the dark. I remember many nights sleeping with my trusty night light so that the monsters wouldn’t get me. Now as an adult I know that the monsters aren’t real and that my room looks the same in the dark as it did in the light but somehow I still have a nagging displeasure about darkness in general, that is until recently.
While it was very easy for me to not like the dark as a child simply because I could not see what was in it, recently I have been reminded that God enters into the darkness with me and it is in those very moments of entering in that Christ’s light shines ever brighter in my life. This Advent, (a season celebrated in darkness, our days are shorter and our nights are longer this time of year) I have been trying to actively take time to stop and be with God, particularly in the darkness of the unknown and in that I have come to start to see the ‘darkness’ of the unknown as no longer negative but rather an opportunity to see light be born from it.
A friend of mine recently sent me the following quote:
“Hope means believing that the light will come from the darkness itself”
When it comes to your relationship with God it can feel like you are in total darkness. You can find yourself asking daily, what does God want from me? What is his plan for my life? Amidst the darkness of the unknowns in your life it can be hard to see God as a real living breathing person who desires to have a relationship with you when you feel like your prayer time is you talking to a wall when all you want is to talk to a person. The reality is that you are talking to a real person! However, I think where our stumbling block lies in this thought process is how we view the unknown in our life. If we see it as something that cannot possibly bring about anything good we shut ourselves down to the possibility of hope, to the possibility of a relationship with him.
This season of Advent is about preparing for the coming of the ultimate light-Christ and Christmas the celebration of Christ entering into our lives. What if in these seasons we shift our thoughts of the unknown not to what it lacks, but rather what it has the potential of holding? What if we were to view this darkness of sight as an opportunity to allow Christ to adorn and illuminate our life? When we allow our spiritual eyes to surrender and “adjust” to the darkness we may find ourselves in, what I think we will find is a God who’s light isn’t a glaring spotlight. It’s not shining into the recesses of our life blinding us, its rather a firelight adorning the dark recesses of our hearts; with a glow that altogether gently illuminates what he desires of us and at the same time slowly burns away the things that are not of him. The question we have to ask then is, not what does God want of me or what is his plan for my life, but rather what is it that he is illuminating right now? If given the chance, God will show you what he wants, we simply have to be willing to venture into the darkness in order to see it and then from there our lives can be transformed into the light that adorns the darkness of this world.