I’d never experienced total darkness before spending a night in a cave.
Fifteen of us, three adults and 12 youth, entered Alabama’s Desoto Caverns in the daylight with headlamps and sleeping bags.
After viewing stalactites, stalagmites and strange insects, our guide prepped us for the night ahead. “It’s going to be dark,” he said. “Really dark.”
I’ll never forget, however, just how eerily dark it was when we extinguished the last light. You could put your hand an inch from your face and see nothing.
Someone whispered, “O my God, it is dark.” It wasn’t profanity; it was a prayer. What a long night that was with no light.
When the sun descended in the ancient world, it was completely dark. The ambient light of bedside lamps and cell phones makes it hard to imagine nightfall in the world of Jesus, where people couldn’t see anything at all.
Into that world, Isaiah the prophet announced that the people walking in darkness had seen a great light (see Isaiah 9:2-7). The Hebrew word for darkness means more than the absence of light. It means, “O my God, it is dark.”
A heavy cloud of gloom, a deep obscurity, had fallen on the people. They felt oppressed and lost.
“Justice is far from us and righteousness does not overtake us,” Isaiah wrote. “We wait for light, but lo, there is darkness. We wait for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope like the blind along a wall, groping and grasping like those who can’t see” (Isaiah 59:9-10).
The U.S. feels a bit like that for me and many others right now. Gloom, argument and disruption create fear for the future. It feels like we’re groping in the dark.
I know that times have been hard before and could be worse in the future. But I’m looking for a little daylight as the year draws to an end, a glimmer of hope. How about you?
If we have eyes to see, we’ll know that hope abounds. You can’t kill hope.
There’s hope when someone shares what they have. There’s hope when a baby is born, a sign that God isn’t through making all things new.
When the light dawned, Isaiah proclaimed, joy would give way to despair. The yoke of oppression would be broken, the heavy burden on peoples’ shoulders removed. Every war boot and blood-stained piece of clothing would be fuel for the fire.
The light would take on flesh. That’s the Christmas story, for those who believe. A child would be born.
“In him was life, and the life was the light of men,” the Gospel of John proclaims. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5).
Even the smallest of lights can make a difference. That’s what we hold onto this Christmas. Still, there is much darkness.
“We can’t see light itself. We can see only what light lights up, like the little circle of night where the candle flickers – a sheen of mahogany, a wineglass, a face leaning toward us out of the shadows,” wrote Frederick Buechner in his book “Wishful Thinking.”
“When Jesus says that he is the Light of the World, maybe something like that is part of what he is saying,” Buechner continued. “He himself is beyond our seeing, but in the darkness where we stand, we see, thanks to him, something of the path that stretches out … even when we can hardly believe that it goes anywhere worth going or that we have what it takes to go there, something of whoever it is that every once in a while seems to lean toward us out of the shadows.”
Winter’s light feels different from that of the summer. It doesn’t comfort or warm us, but still it shines. We wait in winter’s light and remember: Spring is coming.
Brent McDougal is senior pastor of Cliff Temple Baptist Church in Dallas. A version of this article first appeared on Cliff Temple’s blog and is used with permission. You can follow him on Twitter @BrentMcDougal.
Brent McDougal is senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee.
