Tuesday, March 12, 2019

...defying and defining

Praise the One who breaks the darkness with a liberating light;
praise the One who frees the prisoners, turning blindness into sight.
Praise the One who preached the Gospel, healing every dread disease,
calming storms, and feeding thousands with the very Bread of peace.
---Rusty Edwards, 1987

Under cover of darkness. They kept me in the dark about their true intentions. Mysterious as the dark side of the moon. Are you afraid of the dark? …these are a few of the things that come to mind when I think of darkness. How about you? Are there sayings, song lyrics, lines of poetry that stay with you when you think of darkness?

I’ll be adding the first line of this hymn to my darkness ‘quotable quotes’, because it is fab.u. lous. The image of ‘breaking the darkness’ immediately evokes daybreak and the break of dawn (and though I haven’t witnessed overly many daybreaks, I hear sunrise is glorious!). I can close my eyes and picture the dark, shattered by the inexorable, irresistible force of light, uncovering, revealing, illuminating. I imagine squinting against the sudden brightness, my skin soaking in the growing warmth.

And I can only begin to grasp what freedom there would be in light, if I had felt bound till the breaking by an endless night of dark. What that liberation must feel like, when the first hint of light glows on the horizon. It would be enough to send me to my knees in praise.

It was Anne Frank who said, “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”


Break the darkness, liberating Light, and not just for me…

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