Light

I'm finding it difficult to talk about this. I keep having these flashes of insight that I just can't put into words when I sit down to do it. I keep diverging into paths I don't want to take. Like trying to get a needle through the exact right spot and constantly coming up in another part of the cloth. I want to talk about light. The kind of piercing bright living light that we find from time to time. It's more than a metaphor. If you haven't experienced it, go find it. It is such an apt description of God. Light emanates and drives back the nothing which is darkness.

I used to shy from light. I preferred the solace of darkness and that was good for a time. It can be perverted like anything else, but light is incorruptible. Now I am so drawn to it. Illuminate! Spread the light out, pierce the dark corners. I want to be known and not hide. I want my scars to show. I want my ruin to be displayed so that it loses all power. In the light there can be no shame, no guilt. All is revealed and the things of darkness lose their power.

I don't wish that any who are afraid of the light be forced into it. Not that I'm against forcing because sometimes we are ready and won't move until forced, but to those who are not ready, forcing does more damage than good. So I want them to be sheltered. But for me, I am so tired of the games we play trying to keep our eyes shut. The light bathes and cleanses and frees us from these pretensions. In the light we can call what is wrong wrong and we can call what is right right. There's no need to beat around it.

I am imperfect and ruined by my own hand and in that I celebrate God's goodness to me. I want to walk in the light, be in the light. I can sometimes feel myself surrounded by light when I close my eyes. The space in my mind which used to be dark is now blindingly bright. There is no falsehood in it. I can picture it bleeding out through my pores and overcoming me. I can picture projecting it, shining it, dancing with it, in it, freed by it. Shining on the poor wretched things cowering in the dark, right at our feet, but unseen in the dark. What things are right at your hand? What pains, fears, humors and valiants beaten to submission, uglies, not good enoughs, sicks, disturbeds. I want to walk into the dark places and have the very ground light at my step on it. I want to see the light fall over them and pass through me to them.

I want to stare long and hard into the blinding source of that light. I want to know him. I want to see it washing out of and over my friends. I want them to let go and stop hiding as well. I want it to overwhelm me and consume me and never leave me. I want it to root out all corners of darkness to the deepest cellars of my soul. I want them to glow of their own with real radiant light not the sickly imitations we shine on them.

I once wrote that some people huddle to candle flickers and cherish them beyond all else but can't see those dancing in absolute conflagration behind them.

The lights have been turned on. Reason, Redemption, Freedom, Restoration, Peace, Rest: all of these have come to those least able to receive them. Even I can't fully accept this. I want those dark places to be illuminated.

Again, I don't mean the darkness that is good, that gives rest and perspective and gravity, but the darkness that hides and shames. The one which festers and bites and imprisons. This must go and everything in those dark places must come to light. I'm ready for it...at least for another step.