There are twinkling lights everywhere piercing the darkness. I scan headlines and bake coffee cake and tuck children into bed. I think. I think about how hard this world is… It tastes so bitter yet so sweet. I get those phone calls, those emails, you know the ones riddled with bad news. I read those headlines and my heart hurts and my head hurts. I know there agendas and there are facts. The fact is the landscape of this terrain is shaded midnight, and do we dare believe there is light still? I wish I could pretend away all the hurt, all the pain, all these beheadings of children for their faith. Children who believed that to live is Christ and to die is gain perhaps deeper than I even know how to believe.

The imprisoned light bearers blowing out the darkness with Gospel heralding faith that will not be silenced, possessing a power that cannot be stopped.

Light and darkness, for just a moment they coexist.

So I thank God He sent Adam & Eve away from that garden. Thank God they didn’t eat the fruit of the Tree of Life and live forever stuck in this state of death and pain and sin. Sin brings about the unbearable hard… and surely we have all lived our fair share of hard… and hard is coming still. Sometimes I close the page, turn away from the headlines, but this is God’s world and He is deeply entrenched in everything beautiful and everything hard in it. And our hearts fill up with thanks or they should, because if He turned away from our hard stuff where would we be by now? Yet He remains with us and tells us to remain in Him.

Our Refuge, our hiding place, our forgiveness, our peace, our hope, our Redeemer, our God refusing to take the Light out of the darkness, and our souls are relieved.

We could not live without Him. And the truth is… though I am not brave enough for it yet… this world cannot live without the Light we now possess. Perhaps at Christmas it is never more apparent, that light in darkness is what we all really want. How we long to turn on the tree and set our porches ablaze with dancing light, because no one really wants to be in the dark, alone, cloaked in hidden sin. And some houses are more bedazzled than others, aren’t they? And some of us have hidden away our light or feared to let it shine. We’ve turned away from the headlines and our neighbor and hidden ourselves safe in our own comfortable normal, whatever that is. But we are not safe here. We never were. We are only safe in Jesus.  And our purpose is only fulfilled in reflecting Light.

Light cannot hide from darkness. No, it is the Light that actually overcomes it. Faith. It comes to me again slowly sometimes, but it always builds, because we are not those who shrink back. We have not received a Kingdom that can be shaken. We have received the Light. And it is the Light of Christ that is overcoming everything we now fear. It’s the light of Christmas, for unto us a Savior is born who is Christ the Lord.

And one day with one final breath He will blow out the darkness.