The Darkness

It was dark when I got up this morning for my daily walk – it has been over a week since I have done this and I was hoping that it would help combat some of the weariness that has found residence in my soul.  I overextended myself this summer and what I thought would be a good distraction is turning out to backfire…..I suppose I should back my story up a little.    

I have spent the past year walking a journey of what Christian culture calls transformation.  When those in leadership preach on the term it seems so innocuous – so innocent – so safe.  The truth is it is a journey back into the darkness of one’s soul revisiting places of pain that have long been cut off  – places that are so infected with toxins that opening them up is like releasing a contagion back into your very existence that births one thought, will my faith survive. The anguish that attends this process is excruciating and if bottled could take a family of rhinoceros down.  Coupling this with the academic expedition through seminary; one that is specifically designed to deconstruct, has left the foundations of my life in constant movement – what I am calling my emotional and theological earthquake.  This is testing the very core of who I am. 

I have faced severe trials in the past – those that have ended other people’s lives both literally and figuratively.  Nonetheless, this time is calling for me to pull on internal resources that I sometimes wonder if I possess.  The tentacles of agony grab and drag me down at the most inconvenient times.  I sometimes find myself crumpled in a corner like yesterday’s dirty laundry tears pouring from a place so dim it oozes from every pore making it difficult to breath.  Yet, this is not the darkness I experienced before – the sable that permeated much of my youth.  I have been blinded by evil’s sinister fingers where the daytime is as black as a starless night; where everything is obscured by a veil of hopelessness concealing any of life’s beauty.  I have been imprisoned by shadow’s nefarious claws that bound me to a deep depression and I have been held captive in desperation’s dark dungeon entombed with no way out.   But this is different…. 

As I walked this morning I thought back upon a recent conversation with a friend in which we shared intimacies about our past.  Both of us had been bound by despair and our shared experience had me reflecting on what I am going through.  This journey is the testing of everything that I believe about God, people and myself.  The structure of my life has scaffolding surrounding it and the foundations have been unearthed.  This has me in a place of extreme vulnerability and one that sometimes suggests that the darkness will once again overtake me.  But that is a lie.  I am intimately familiar with darkness – I know it like a wife knows her husband.  I know it like others will thankfully never know it.  I possess an understanding of its nature that has not; nor will it ever fully disappear from my soul.  It has left its indelible handprint on me like a tattoo that has been permanently etched into my skin.  However, the darkness overextended itself.  In its quest to destroy my life it underestimated one thing…… the nail shaped scars that cover those handprints allowing for the light to shine hope back into my soul.