John 1:5 is one of my favorite verses, and it becomes even more significant on these December days when EVERYONE loves light and light is EVERYWHERE. In fact, our family can’t go anywhere after dark during the holiday season without playing the Christmas light game. One side of the car counts the lights they see on their side, and the other side, vice versa.
This game is much more fun to play at night because light is harder to see in the, well, light. This is something that seems so obvious, but we tend to forget it when we go through exceptionally dark times. We begin to feel like the place we are is too far for even God’s light to find us. But the fundamental truth about light is that it actually uses the darkness around it to draw our focus to it.
I learned this during one of the worst seasons of my life, and it was then that I think I really started to get to know Jesus. He is the Light of the world, and even on our darkest days, the darkness CANNOT OVERCOME HIM.
I guess you could say that the day I met Jesus was the worst day of my life.
Here is another excerpt from the book that I know is beginning to well up from the deep places of my soul. I pray that what I learned on my darkest days will shine light on you when you face your darkest days, too.
Light shines in darkness. In fact, most of us wouldn’t know what light is if we hadn’t first been in some pretty dark places. The beginning of all that we know was a place of darkness, and then God brought light. When our ancestor, Adam, brought darkness back into the world by doing the unthinkable – choosing momentary pleasure over eternal peace – God brought light into the world again. To be more specific, he sent light into the world, and John’s description of that act was that light shone in the darkness, and the darkness couldn’t overcome it.
Isn’t that how light is? It is brighter and more brilliant when the setting is the darkest. It is more appreciated, too. How many times have we stumbled in the darkness at night, groping along the wall for the switch and been relieved to finally find it? We hate darkness so much that we eventually memorize the steps necessary to get to the switch the next time.
And so it is with worst days. They are the backdrop to what can become our best days, because light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. God intends to step into our worst days and bring light from them. Understand this: God sent the light into the darkness because that’s where the light needs to shine the most. It is on our worst days that we finally see the Light of the world.
The fact that he stays with us then and there – on our darkest and worst days – is what makes the gospel good news.
