The Darkness

Tonight Kelli and I walked to Evan’s house to watch Friday Night Lights. Evan and Trevor (who’s in Dubai right now to see his sweetie… it’s a rough life!) live all of a five minutes’ walk from our house… no big deal. But the streets in between our houses are more like dirt paths that are big enough for vehicles… sometimes more than one at a time. They’re rutted and bumpy and rocky and not at all level. Suffice it to say that for this clumsy girl, walking the roads around my house is difficult enough in the daytime.

But we walked to Evan’s tonight in the dark. And when I say dark, I mean dark. There are no streetlights. Most houses in the neighborhood don’t have electricity. (And lately, even the ones that are wired to the power company don’t usually have electricity!) And the moon has been rising later this week, so when we walked over around 7:45 it was pretty stinkin’ dark. Dark enough to see stars. Bunches of them.

I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m not really even all that concerned about walking in the dark. I’ve gotten familiar enough with the roads around here that I figured I’d be fine in the dark. (And after 31 years of being a total klutz, I’ve gotten used to falling, so that’s not really a big deal, either.) And I knew that, after a few minutes, my eyes would adjust to the darkness and I’d see pretty well. But Kelli decided to bring along her flashlight.

During our five minute walk, it dawned on me that the little flashlight we had with us made the darkness seem, well, darker. I’m not saying that it wasn’t dark to begin with, because it was. But that little bit of light that we had made the darkness around us even more noticeable. And life is the same way.

We know that the world around us is dark. There’s no denying it. But we talk ourselves into going out without the Light, and gradually we get used to the darkness. It somehow doesn’t seem quite so dark. It’s not so bad anymore. And we wind up stumbling over some rut in the road or a broken brick that we couldn’t see… because the darkness around us lured us in. How critical it is that, as we go out into this dark world that we live in, we consciously take our Lamp and Light with us. Yes, He makes the darkness seem that much darker… because it is. The absolute absence of Light creates a vacuum that He illuminates. The closer I get to Him, the more I realize just how dark this world is. It breaks my heart to see people willingly living in that darkness when they could have the Light as well. Oh, how I wish they could understand just how wonderful the Light is!

And yes, I did stumble just a bit on the way to Evan’s. My butt didn’t hit the ground, though, so I don’t think it really counts.