I’ve always loved golden hour.  If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the 60 minutes or so just before the sun sets.  There’s something about that last bit of light that makes our small slice of the earth hum and glow, full, deep, lovely. Some people are sunrise people. Some people are constellation-watching, night-sky people. I am forever a part of the golden hour people.

When I was a student and living in Paris, I tried my best to never miss those moments every day. In a city of exceptional beauty, Paris has exceptional talent with golden hours. My appreciation for this time of day didn’t start in Paris, but it was certainly magnified there. I think I love it because it’s striking, and because to me, it’s what Eden must have looked and felt like that – humming and glowing  – in the cool of the day when God came to walk with His people.

These days, I most often watch the golden hour come and go from my desk at work. The beauty unfolds as I scurry to finish last things on the to-do list. A few weeks ago, I looked up, bleary-eyed from last-minute proofs to see the golden light quickly being replaced by the approaching dark. I realized something I’d never noticed before: there’s a story here, in day breathing its last hues, and exquisitely so, right in the face of encroaching dark, hungry for its fill of the sky. It’s somehow both lovely and painful at the same time.

Maybe it struck me that way because that’s not too far from how life has felt this fall – both painful and lovely, simultaneously dark and light.

A few months ago, I wrote about living life with open hands and trusting God in what He puts and takes out of our hands:

I want to hold my hands open to the God who loves me and be thankful for all that He places there. Knowing, believing, trusting that what He gives is good – truly and wholly. I want to hold my hands open, joyfully tending to what’s there with diligence, grace and wholehearted intention, forever remembering that it’s his grace that put it all there and that none of it may stay forever.
–The Open Hand Policy, September 2014

Then, just a few day later, my family got news that snapped us in half. The kind of news you never want to hear, that you hope no one anywhere ever has to hear. News that given a hundred chances won’t make sense, given a hundred years won’t feel right.

And light is lapped up by an unquenchable darkness.

There are days when the sorrow is so strong that face to the ground, all I can do is lay down and cry. No other posture feels like it can bear the weight of or understand this particular darkness. And yet the darkness – that on those days feels so heavy it might crush everything inside of me – cannot seem to extinguish the light that fills my life. Family and their time, friends and their words, strangers and their prayers, God and his presence – they all have had their ways of slapping back the dark and like a life jacket, pulling me back up to the light.

It’s in this time that I’ve become more aware that life is, really, a pas de deux of dark and light. We see it all over Scripture and feel it every day in our own lives. In Genesis, God commanded light to invade the dark. In Exodus, the Egyptians endured a darkness so thick it could be felt. In Isaiah, the prophet writes, The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shown. In Psalms, we both walk in the shadow of death and sing in the shadow of God. In John, we learn that the light of men, Jesus, shines the in darkness and that darkness cannot overcome him. In the Gospels and throughout the New Testament, we read over and over that Jesus took our darkness so that we might have His light. And in Revelation, there is a promise that one day, there will be no more night and Jesus will forever give us light.

Dark and light, dark and light – until one day when dark will be no more.

The inextinguishable light is coming – I fully believe and know that – but can I be honest and admit that while I’m waiting for that day, the darkness can be so very jagged and strong.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this fall, it’s that there are many, many people who have and are walking through dark as night things – situations, circumstances, experiences. They have stories of heartache and loss, troubles and trials that line their past and fill their present. We are not alone – if only we could flip on the light and see how many others are stumbling a few feet away.

And so, I’m back at my desk picking at words and watching the light glow against bare winter branches, thinking about and witnessing dark and light meld together. I badly want to tie a neat bow around this story, turning the sorrow into a smile. For now though, there just isn’t a way. The dark comes and light chases it away. Dark creeps up again, and the light pulls us back into its glow. As The Avett Brothers sing, “There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light.”

I have no answer for the dark except one: Jesus. There is no darkness that He cannot or will not enter for us. And I have no way of completely shielding you or myself from the dark – a topic I’ve wrestled with God about all fall. But this I can try to promise: with my words and my life and my time and my love, to flood your darkness with light.

 

In this time and place, I think that’s the best we can do.

 

^——–

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,”made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. {2 Corinthians 4:5-6}

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. {John 1:5}