“Shadowlands” is a movie based on the life of C. S. Lewis that chronicles his marriage to his wife, Joy, and ultimately his grief when she died. It is a compelling and authentic film.

There is nothing enjoyable about the shadowlands, those places in our lives where it seems the light doesn’t shine. They are places of loss, grief, pain, suffering. Places where we can feel abandoned, rejected, alone. The familiar voice of disappointment can be heard in the shadows, and it is often accompanied by other voices, too. Bitterness, offense, anger.

All of those are very real, and it’s so easy to drown in that quicksand of reality. But there is something even more real that gets overlooked in the shadowlands when we’re so focused on our pain.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John‬ ‭1:5‬ ‭NIV, emphasis mine)

The beauty in the shadows is simply that shadows can’t exist without light. The shadowlands aren’t the darklands! There are dark nights of the soul, but they do not exist in places that the light of God cannot reach. We focus so much on the part where Jesus said the light overcomes the darkness that we skip right past the first thing Jesus said.

The light shines in the darkness.

If I am in a shadow, it is because something has gotten between me and the light. Sometimes that is of my own doing (ok, a lot of times), but sometimes it is simply a circumstance that is beyond my control. But it’s never beyond His light, and as we move through the shadowlands toward the light, we will eventually see the other side of that circumstance bathed in the light.

Shadowlands are dark, for sure, but we can only be swallowed by that darkness if we turn the shadowlands into our home. But this is not our home. We are, as the old gospel singers would belt, just passing through, and as we do, we’ll find ourselves once again stepping into the light.

Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash