Comes The Night

Since, as I have shared in previous blogs, God works the night shift and gives us songs in the night, then, by necessity, God must either bring or allow the night to come.  If the night were not to come into our lives, there could be no breaking of  day.  If there were not a sundown there could not be a sunup - no dusk, no dawn.  Mae sense?

The answer to why there are periods of darkness in our lives begins with the fact that we live in a dark and fallen world.  The darkness of night is not where God desires we live, "For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves" (Col 1:13).  While darkness comes when God's light is not present, it is we who choose to move away from him, turning our backs on his light.  He will allow the darkness to overshadow us as we exercise our divine right to reject the Divine Ruler.

We choose to pursue material wealth, which so often leads us down a path of greed and the isolated life that follows.  We choose to let our wandering eyes take us down dark and dangerous paths of fornication and adultery, destroying our families and our reputations.  We choose to run after the things of this world, which causes us to run away from the presence of God and the light of his presence.

Sometimes the night truly comes upon us in the form of a tragedy we did not cause - an accident we did not see coming, a disease that took us by surprise, an attack from without we did not promote.  But so much of the time, we are the source of our own darkness.  Think of all the heart attacks, diabetes and strokes caused by obesity, which did not come upon anyone, it was invited.  I talked to a man not long ago who smoked for 40 years and then questioned why God gave him lung cancer.  Yeah, no that wasn't God.

When I was a boy, I once saw an old woman I thought had cancer, but I didn't know anyone who live in the night of chemo and radiation treatments.  Today, everyone I know has a loved-one touched by it if not themselves.  I have six people in my close association who have cancer, not to mention my wife and my late wife.  We live in a world where 1 in 2.5 people are expected to be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.  Do you think that is God's work or some kind of freak twist of nature?  How about the fact that our food supply is saturated with chemicals from being sprayed in the fields to being processed in the factories?

The night comes, tragedy happens, pain finds us, we walk into traps, we make bad choices, whatever, but in the end comes the night.  Whether we accept the blame or try to blame God, there is only one Source of light and it is not you and I.  What Isaiah prophesied in 9:1-2, came to pass with Jesus' incarnation: "the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned" (see Mark 4:12-17).

The tragedy of night coming is followed by the triumph of light coming.  "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes shall not perish but have everlasting life" (Jn 3:16).  The world is dark and brings us into dark periods of the soul but Jesus is "the light" and will bring brightness to your spirit.  Jus' Say'n.