I’m pretty good at fooling myself. I don’t want to grow or change in ways that hurt. More often than I’d care to admit, I prefer a happy lie to the sorrowful truth.
And that’s understandable. Reality can be tough to deal with.
Sometimes, I look around me and all I see is darkness. I see the ways we hurt one another, our selfishness and pride. I don’t just see it in other people; it’s me too. I’m no different.
I’m seeing that ocean of darkness George Fox talked about. Sometimes, I feel like the world around me is flooded by it. It can be hard to breathe. I’m drowning in it.
When the darkness is so thick, it’s difficult to believe that there’s anything else.
As tough as it is to look at my own fallen condition, and that of others, I can’t look away. I can’t pretend that I don’t see. I can’t settle for the happy lies anymore.
This is really happening. This is who we are.
And there’s hope in that. Because though we’re standing in a dark place right now, we’re not without a flashlight. The darkness does not have to be our fate. The very yearning of my heart tells me that we were made for more.
As hard as this is, as much as it hurts, I want to embrace the struggle. I want to come into the light, even if it burns. And I want to bring others with me.
I know I can’t do this on my own. But there is a power at work in me – in all of us – that can and will do this thing. As broken as our world is, I know that Jesus can heal it. Not because I said so, not because it’s written in a book, but because he’s alive and at work in the world today. He’s being the light in this darkness.
I want to be light, too.
When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. – George Fox, Journal