Finding rest and hope in the darkness

At this time of year, when daylight is in short supply, I am reminded of the restorative blessing of darkness. My chickens first alerted me to the necessity of the dark. As daylight fades in the fall, so does their egg production. The sunlight signals their bodies to produce. Darkness gives them much needed rest for their little bodies.

For most of my life darkness has always meant something bad or scary. Unknown. Mysterious. Frightening. I slept with a nightlight growing up to keep "monsters" away. It wasn't until a few years ago that I began to wonder if perhaps darkness was, in fact, necessary. And not in that Christianese lingo of "without darkness, one would not know the light." I mean darkness has its own God-given function in our lives. We need the darkness as much as we need the light.

I credit the possibility of this wonderment to Barbara Brown Taylor's book, "Learning to Walk in the Dark" (2014). Like Taylor, I was raised in the church, where light and darkness were always pitted against one another. Light resembled everything Godly and good. Darkness embodied all the bad-sin, evil, death and pain. It took me years of adulthood and life experience to realize this dualistic separation just falls apart-at least it does for me. I've experienced incredible hope and joy with inmates in jail. Even at funerals, when forced to stare death straight in the face.

I have learned and grown just as much in the dark, from the dark moments of my life, as I have in the light of day. Those difficult moments of pain and darkness have shaped me in ways I would not change. I needed them in order to more fully live and experience life as it is.

I'm not saying I prefer the dark or even like the dark. I'm simply saying I've grown to appreciate the necessity of darkness. God is still present and fully alive in the dark. We need not be afraid. Psalm 139 reminds me that even if I were to go to the darkness of the grave, God would be there too!

Though we are in the midst of dark days now-literally and figuratively-perhaps we need this time. Perhaps the dark is necessary and good, in its own way. For even after God separated light and darkness at that moment of creation, God still looked upon all of it and said, "It is very good."

Let this time of darkness be a gift to you. Or if you can't quite let yourself go there just yet, at the very least, let it not be a time of fear nor of obsessing over unknowns. It doesn't have to be. Perhaps instead, it could be a necessary time of rest for weary souls and bodies, a time of wondering and hope. Whatever this time is, we need it.