God’s Light Penetrates Darkness
I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night -- but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are both alike to you. -- Psalm 139:11-12
The woman smiled brightly at the world. She seemed happy, carefree, full of life. Except the brightness never reached her eyes. The vibrant blue was clouded in sorrow and despair. I worked with her for a number of years. It never changed.
She was an adult who’d been cast aside by her family when she rejected their cult. I call it a cult because even though they professed to know and love Jesus, He had no part in their mind games. This young women had been sexually molested throughout her childhood. Her parents knew and refused to intervene. When she became an adult, she left them. The scars she carried with her.
Oh, she’d seen a number of doctors. She was on anti-depressants and participated in weekly talk therapy. But she couldn’t shake the past. She couldn’t believe herself worthy of anything but the labels her family had pinned on her: demon, jezebel, worthless.
They had denied her self-worth when she was vulnerable and without a champion. And, as an adult, she carried that with her. She couldn’t seem to separate the wonderful person she was from the child who’d suffered at the hands of people who preached the gospel in public and lived as Satan in private.
I wish she’d reached out to God but she couldn’t seen to separate God from her abusers. She couldn’t understand a God who would allow such horror to happen to her. She couldn’t believe that He loved her and still allowed such awful things to take place.
How can any of us ever understand or explain what happens in this fallen world? We know that God is all-powerful and can save us from all evil. But the truth is usually He doesn’t intervene in the choices we make, even when the choices of a few destroy those around them. Instead, God takes what is horrible and turns it into something good. If we let Him.
God would have offered her a safe haven, a healing touch, a way out of the darkness. He waited for her to cry out to Him but she never did. At least in the years I knew her. She preferred to pretend that everything was okay. That she was fine. That the past was where it belonged.
Until the day she didn’t show up for work. I called a mutual friend, who found her suffering the effects of too many pills washed down by alcohol. Our friend walked her around and kept her awake for hours. Why didn’t the friend call an ambulance? Why not make a fuss?
I called her doctor the next day. I know. I was sticking my nose in someone else’s struggle. I don’t know if she ever received the peace she deserved. I do know she never forgave me for making the call. I’d do it again. I just wanted her to live. And she just wanted the pain to end.
We forget sometimes that darkness can never, ever hide God’s light. When we’re in the midst of something so horrific, so bleak, so unyielding that we can’t see our way out, God can and will provide the light if we’ll only call out to Him. It takes a lot of courage. It takes hitting rock bottom and admitting that you’re there. It’s not easy but sometimes calling to God from the darkness is the only way to make it back to the light. I sometimes wonder if she ever figured that out.
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