I promise you, I am NOT throwing a pity party. But the past week has been really hard for my family. Three out of five in our household went down with the flu. A wonderful family member passed. Then another lady from my childhood and a family friend passed. On top of that, another family member went into the hospital and got some bad news. Our mettle is being tested, as people used to say. In other words, “life” is seeing what we’re made of these days.
Moments like these seem dark. Almost like you are about to be overtaken by something. We look for light but it is so hard to find. Take this photo I took from my back porch yesterday evening. It looks like the darkness is about to overtake the little light that is left in the day, and that is obviously what happened. I watched those beautiful pinks shift to orange, then fade into the obscurity of a blue-turned-black sky. It was hard to see anything as the clouds blanketed the entire view.
The dark of night overtaking the light of day.
“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! 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. 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.”” —Psalm 139.7-12 ESV
That line, “even the darkness is not dark to you.” I needed THAT line. It tells me that even when it seems dark to me, it isn’t dark to God. It can get as black as black can be. It can be as bad as the imagination can contrive or invent, but to God there is goodness to find yet. And do you know what goodness there is to find? It’s God—God Himself. God is the highest good, the best thing, the hope in the darkness; for there is no dark to God, for “the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.”
I raised my head up last night and I hope you will raise yours up, too. It may seem tough; it may be bad; hope may be lost to you in this moment, but it is not lost to God.
—Pastor Whit