Always Growing in the Dark
When we bought our house, there was a portion of our attic had already been converted into a bedroom. However, this portion didn’t have a window, so I felt uncomfortable having it be an actual bedroom where people slept. For two years we saved up money and looked for a contractor. Then, one June we went to visit our family and came home to a lot of construction dust and the most beautiful dormer you ever did see. My husband and I immediately claimed it as our bedroom and gave over the downstairs bedroom to our family’s coats, backpacks, books, and LEGO sets. (It was a win/win.)
My body seems to understand how beautiful this dormer is all on its own. Most mornings, I open my eyes to that liminal place between full consciousness and unconscious sleep. It is still dark, but the type of dark that happens right before dawn, when the blackness of night is light blue around the edges.
It happens quickly; the sun begins to chase the dawn bringing clarity into my bedroom. The bedroom that was a dark cocoon only seconds before begins to itself wake up. My labradoodle stirs, then my husband. I welcome a new day.
These morning moments of mine always remind me of the language we find in Psalm 139:9-10 –
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
The wings of morning bring us face-to-face with the swiftness of the changes that life brings. Some of those changes are so swift that we feel blindsided by them and we try our best to escape. We sink into ourselves, isolating or numbing. Or we try to take control and mangle the wings of change into some version of what we want life to be. Psalm 139 reminds us that we can ride those wings, or we can mangle them, but we will never be apart from where God’s hand holds us.
The problem comes that not every morning’s dawn is not peaceful, not every change is not lovely and effervescent. Some mornings, some changes, seem darker than others. What do we do when we wake up to darkness and have a hard time seeing the blue edges, the clarity, the sunshine to come?
Here is a helpful reminder:
There are places God sees, that we cannot see.
There is a Light that is brighter, when life is not.
We don’t have to escape life or wrangle life under our control, because He has a plan for all of life, even the darkness.
Psalm 139:11-12 –
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
Have you been there? Have you felt like darkness would cover you, that it’s a cloak that would wrap itself around you, so that God or anyone else who loves you would walk right past you?
When we feel as though darkness is overtaking our lives, God says, “I am your Sunshine.”
When we feel as though the changes are too swift, the loss too much to bear, the searching too invasive, God is not deterred. We are always growing in every day, and every season, whether light or dark, dawn or midnight. We don’t have to understand our experiences to benefit from God’s hand on them. There is growth there, in darkness too.
That darkness is still bright to God who molds it into His making.
Even that darkness is growth before our Bright and Morning Star.
GROWTH QUESTIONS:
What particular experiences or seasons of change have been a challenge for you to navigate? Especially consider different phases of life or development, ie the teen years, changing jobs, midlife, empty nesting, etc.
What sunshine, though maybe faint, have you found God brings into the darker seasons and the more difficult changes of life?
Next Up: Join us for discussion around the second video in our Always Growing study, Always Growing in Relationship. Find the discussion on the Facebook event page: