When you are thrown into darkness,
The damp earth beneath your feet,
Toes tapping gingerly to grab hold of solid ground,
Waiting for your eyes to adjust.
The circles and stars thrum behind your eyelids as the darkness cradles you with its eerie pulsing.
Darkness is the piney smell and crackle of sticks when the stars pop out with piercing radiance and the cold scrapes your nose.
Darkness is the throbbing emptiness in your chest,
A lingering companion,
Unwelcome and heavy,
A testament to big love that leaves tender scars in its wake.
Darkness encompasses.
It masks the road signs.
It blurs the guideposts.
The blanket of pitch black emptiness extinguishes the street lamps,
Hurling all the routines and the structure and the order and the coping strategies into obsolescence.
We grapple with the dark,
A Gethsemane type of dark.
It seeps in like the wet grass stains circling on our kneecaps as we wait,
Suspended,
Knowing we don't know.
Filling pangs of pain and suffering,
Of isolation,
Of loss,
Of betrayal,
Grasping at the whisper of a prayer that maybe this cup could be removed,
Lifted,
The world writed,
The clouds parted,
The seas calmed.
But as we give into the dark,
As we release that last bit of fight and our weight falls,
We buckle into the earth and we let out the breath we have been holding.
And we feel the strain drain from our tightened shoulders and clenched fists.
And we let go of that last shred of delusion of control.
Reality dawns and an ember sparks down deep,
Spastic and fragile.
Yet not my will,
But yours.
No well-lit rooms and tidy theories to distract from what is.
Sitting here in the dark,
Raw,
Exposed,
Disoriented and stunned into a posture of sitting,
Of waiting,
Of being.
God,
Speak to us as you did in the beginning when you spoke light.
In this posture of waiting enveloped in the darkness,
We are listening and we are ready for the hope that you usher in.
Mold us to be people who don't shy away from the real.
Breathe into us the courage and the stamina to remain,
To stay put,
To show up,
To accept this dark time and to soak in all the growth that you would have us to glean from it.
Enfold us in the richness of the unknown and foster in us an eagerness to receive Jesus Christ into the world,
Even if it's through our tears and our aching hearts and bodies position us to welcome you.
As we wait for the light,
Work transformation in us.
Change us into compassionate,
Bold,
Grounded,
Loving,
Fearless vessels for your light.
Cradle us in the dark until we are more like the Jesus we will cradle in our arms.
In your holy name we pray.
Amen.
