God in the dark

"It's a quarter 'till tomorrow; only half past yesterday. . ."

For the moment I have given up on sleeping and have decided to spend these late hours back at the mac. It's one of those nights where so much is going through your mind that you realize you've been staring at the ceiling for quite some time. Since I was a bit restless, I figured I'd get up for a while.

We watched The Village earlier in the evening. Instead of offering a movie review I'll just identify with the main character, Ivy Walker. Here is a blind girl who is driven out of love to wander into the woods alone for the benefit of her fiance, Lucius. Despite her obvious vulnerability, she risks her life and feels her way around in the dark as an act clinging to hope. Here is a plot to which I can relate.

Increasingly, I have been feeling the limits of what I can see and how much I really know. Don't get me wrong here. . .although I've often been accused of being a fountain of worthless information, I have never considered myself to be a know-it-all (those types of people irritate me). But seriously, more and more I feel that my paths are fewer, my options more limited, and my dreams quickly escaping. More and more my answer becomes, "I don't know."

I am in the dark.

And now I'm beginning to learn that feeling around in the dark is a good thing. I was recently told, "We don't always control whether or not the lights will go out. But when that happens, we can either be content to sit in the darkness or be so compelled to search for the switch."

I am not content with the darkness.

And then there's tonight. Here I am sitting in the dark when it occurs to me that there is work to be done, something to be found in the darkness. I consider this possibility because there was once a chaotic darkness into which a voice spoke and produced light. A short while after that the darkness was being removed by a light that dared step into the black. And perhaps now there is a light to be found at 3am.

". . .The voice often comes in the middle of the night or the early hours of morning, when our hearts are most unedited and vulnerable. At first, we mistake the source of this voice and assume it is just our imagination. We fluff up our pillow, roll over, and go back to sleep. Days, weeks, even months go by and the voice speaks to us again: Aren't you thirsty? Listen to your heart. There is something missing.
We listen and we are aware of. . .a sigh. And under the sigh is something dangerous, something that feels adulterous and disloyal to the religion we are serving. We sense a passion deep within that threatens a total disregard for the program we are living; it feels reckless, wild. Unsettled, we turn and walk quickly away, like a woman who feels more than she wants to when her eyes meet those of a man not her husband." *

Perhaps this is where the postmodern church is finding itself today. This could certainly fill another blog, but it is interesting to note that an increasing amount of believers are finding that they do not fit within the culture of the local churches. While it is not surprising that a generation of non-traditional people do not feel at home in a traditional church, there might be more to this than meets the eye. Consider that many believers who are not content to sit in the dark are handed nothing more than broken light bulbs from most religious communities - and then told to be content. Such a situation is definitely the source of a rather large chasm driving the emerging culture of the church forward.

Annie Dillard once said, "We wake, if ever we wake at all, to mystery." Such a reality. Such a recognizable fact. Such a truth. Such a missing component of 'typical' church.



*Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 1.