A light turns on in
the
darkness
and
finally you can see.
But what darkness is there that can overtake and suffocate us, pressing it's belly down upon our heads to make us believe we are so small? Only the darkness of doubt and the oppression of worry, twining their fingers through our hair and pulling on our heart strings with malicious intent. This darkness is thin like film exposures, and it's imprints reflect the small traces of life where we have not stepped into our Curators hands to be found, cleaned, and exposed for all we are truly worth. These imprints bleed with disbelief and are the shadows of our discontent. These imprints exemplify the negatives of our every experience, hardly defined by lines of clarity or reality, but so easily indulged. Our imaginations are magnificent birthing places, chalk boards of God within our thoughts - but sometimes our greatest assets can be our greatest crutches. Our strength is also our weakness if allowed to crawl in the wrong direction and open the wrong door. If allowed to sneak it's way into hazard, this strength is left standing alone without the company of it's family and without proper covering, in a land where it has no home and it's occupation have never been necessary or even heard of. It is suddenly useless and all of the heart which flushed it with vitality is sunk into the desolate hollow of "irrelevant and worthless." No strength, no dream, no man, can thrive in a place where they are unwanted and unneeded; it is the quintessential place of death for all things with a fleeting hope.
This is where the darkness of doubt and the oppression of worry awaken and prowl. This is where they feed and grow in gluttony. These dirty creatures, these dark clouds, huddle and hang in the in-between spaces of our breaths, in the wake of our new ideas, five footsteps behind us on our journeys forward. They do not live in the places we are traveling, for we have not yet arrived in those places as we create them with our Father. They do not even live in the present moments while we dream and imagine what could be, perusing through our memories and pulling out small details to build a better future out of the past. They do no exist in our smiles, in our laughter, in our joy. They cannot be in the presence of Holiness; they are not borne of our hearts. The darkness of doubt and worry only exist in the moment of looking back. They find life in the moment of abandoning progress and losing focus on the promise land. Darkness swells in the moment of forsaking light - what a simple concept so easily forgotten. A light can be of no use when our backs are turned from it, just as a photograph can tell us nothing if we busy ourselves trying to decipher the negative imprint of the real image.
These dark things only suffocate our hearts when we turn from our dreams and forget to believe in ourselves while we pursue them. So what is stopping us? Surely, it cannot be ourselves.
A light turns on in the darkness and finally you can see. We are the lamps to our destinies if we would only believe it is so. The light is belief in the promises spoken during solitude, in the dreams stirring where none can see, in the journey forward that has yet to unfold. It is the illumination of belief.
The light is to sacrifice looking back, to shed the drab garments of disbelief, open our eyes, and live.
