Facing Darkness

 

Every year since 2013, I have asked God at the beginning of the year for a word to guide my year and I spend a few weeks listening for the word. Resolutions, and the inevitable failure that dogs them, weigh me down instead of drawing me forward. But a word to focus my thoughts and my choices carries with it no judgment, no shame. I recognize the word as my God-given one when it resonates with something I’ve been feeling a need for or an interest in, and also rolling it around in my mind gives me a sense of resolve, of readiness. Some of my words for the year have been courage, pilgrimage, truth, and thankfulness. At the end of 2020, my mother was diagnosed with a high grade bladder cancer. Thankfully, it was caught at an early stage. I was very ready for a word that would give me strength to hope and also give me a focus that would help me support her through the surgery she was booked for and whatever else came. It was slower than usual in coming. New Year came and went and still no word. I went to God, asking. His reply was so quiet I could hardly hear it.

“Darkness”, he said.

“Wait, what? Darkness? That’s my word?” It didn’t fit the pattern – a long string of hopeful, sometimes hard but beautiful words that drew my eyes up and forward. Could God give me a negative word? Could I handle thinking about darkness for a year? Why would the Father of Lights, in whom is no darkness at all, direct my mind to darkness? Maybe he had meant to give me “light” and I had twisted it?

“Um. God. How about the word ‘light’? It seems so much more like you. Wouldn’t that be a better focus for me? More positive?”

“Learn how to face the dark, Jen.” I could feel the gentleness in him, but there was no backing down.

So I began this year thinking about darkness. There was a lot of darkness to face. My mother’s massive surgery (a radical cystectomy) left her with a dangerous intestinal blockage that brought us back to the hospital and drew her to the very brink of death. She is was in intense pain for weeks. She couldn’t eat. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Even when awake, she was often confused or delirious. A multitude of tubes ran in and out of her body. Eight monitors were stacked one on another on poles next to her bed, their bluish glow fighting back more than one kind of dark. My father came to stay with her during the day. He was fighting his own dark, swinging alone between fear and denial. Terror was never far from either of us. I could hardly bear to be alone in my parents’ house, where I went for naps. The pipes sometimes clanked. Beams creaked. I imagined shadows everywhere. I felt like a child again, afraid of the dark. Through it all, the word I had been given reminded me that the darkness I was facing was not random. It did not impose itself on me. It had been chosen, allowed, measured, prepared. And I was being prepared too.

Again and again, I went back to God, laying out my fears and asking him to fight for me. How could I fight darkness? He needed to do it. He did fight, and he taught me how to fight too. It wasn’t anything I had imagined – me as Sir Gawain, raising my prayer sword. I realized that God was not asking me to stand up. He was asking me to bow. I would go into the dark, but I wasn’t the warrior. I would carry him in and give him back the right he had given me – to choose for myself. He would conquer the darkness, not me. It wasn’t easy. If I give God the right to choose for me, I have to do that knowing that he will choose Good. Good is not ice cream and sunshine and kittens. Good is a truck that will roll relentlessly across you if you happen to be in the way. Good is a cross. As C.S. Lewis famously put it, “We are not so much doubting that God will do the best for us. We are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

I had to decide if I was more afraid of darkness or of a great Good that could not budge an inch from its own goals or prioritize my concerns over its own mandate in any way. Then I remembered that God is not a cold, impersonal Good. He is personal, touched by humanity. Most importantly, he as kind as he is good. His goodness may be relentless, but he never gives unnecessary pain. He never makes mistakes in measuring the value of the good he gives. He is not only the omnipotent, omniscient Creator; he is a grieving Father and an obedient Son – the Man of Sorrows, touched by pain and dread. The Jesus of Gethsemane, dreading his future and longing for friendship, he is one who can be trusted with all of my longings and my deep dread.

This is what it means to pray: to pull out our fears and our desires and all the contradictory, winding wants out of our hearts and lay them out before God, and to give him the title deeds to all of them - the right to speak for us and move for us and work for us. All of the rights to sovereignty of will and self-direction that God gave us at creation are given back to him when we pray, not because we give up, not because we are weak, not because it was not good for us to have these rights, but because at our most powerful, we choose love and truth and good – and this is God.

So I learned that facing darkness well means naming what I am afraid of, admitting it’s too big for me, giving God my right to myself, and allowing him to figure out how much of love and truth and good I can handle when these hard things are wrapped in his great kindness. My choice was put to a terrible test the day that my mother was sent for emergency surgery. After two weeks in the hospital, the doctor had to admit that he didn’t know what was happening and ordered a last-minute weekend surgery. Physically and mentally exhausted, I was terrified of getting sick and being barred from the hospital, so my sister stayed overnight with my mother and got the news. It filled me with a great dread. My deepest fear was right there in front of me, rising up. I slept fitfully, swinging back and forth between begging God and fighting him, even in my dreams. In the morning, I grasped the corners of my will and drew them together. I would give God the choice. I had to go in to the hospital to say goodbye, and I asked God for the words.

“Go with Jesus.”

I rolled the words over and around in my mind. They were full of bitterness but also sweet. I couldn’t bear to hope, but I clung to the kindness of God. Hadn’t he brought me home from Korea to Nova Scotia, in the middle of a pandemic, before any of us had any inkling that cancer had invaded my mother’s body? Hadn’t he prepared my life situation, given me enough time and money to stay with my parents through the whole ordeal? Hadn’t he given me long quiet days with my mother all winter? I couldn’t hope in the future, but I could thank God for what was done. He was, without a doubt, kind.

“Go with Jesus,” I told Mom, and both of our eyes were bright with tears. She was calm and sure. We held hands and thanked God.

I went home with Dad to wait. My body felt like lead. My mind was a whirling storm. The minutes went by with clunks and thuds. I couldn’t think about the future. I held tight to the kindness of God. I thanked him for the gifts safely in my hands – the love between my mother and I, the Jesus we both knew, the great mercy of getting to be there instead of the other side of the world while she dealt with what cancer meant for her and all of us.

Then came the call. I could hardly believe it – she was alive. They had found the problem and were hopeful that it had been corrected. I bowed deeply in my mind before the God who had been with me in the long dark. He was still there. I knew this was no reward, no favour. I had given him the right to act as himself in my life. He had chosen Good, and he was kind.