For N, In Your Darkest Hour

So, you have asked me what I did when I was drowning, when I fell and saw no light. Like you have, you say.

It is a good question. For this is a good time for you to learn new things. And to learn a new thing is to be alive, to live as an image of the Increate, as a glove is the image of a hand.

Here we find something hard. You hold onto these things, things that we will not keep for all is but grass. Love deeply and do not hold them. A paradox, I suppose. We give up needing to live in the depths of desire, a desire finding its true joy in Him.

So, what then?

What do you take joy in? What do you delight in, this morning when burns across the east into the car; this evening after she has said again how little love she has for you, how little respect?

Here. In this moment.

It is no good to say, “that’s all bullshit!” because I have seen your children: they are beautiful, full of potentials and wonder. It is no good to say “but they may be taken from me!” because sooner or later they will be anyway. Or you from them. We all must die, passing from this way. Whether you first, as is natural, or not, the separation will still happen.

All things will someday pass away.

And this time, it, too, shall one day pass.

Here, in my darkest hour, I saw a telephone wire against the winter sky. A stark image caught for me by the sound of an elevated train. A long moment with a single image, framed for me; a moment outside my city life.

It was enough for that day and its trials. I lived.

Another time, I heard my friend calling me, not speaking his fears for me. I made a choice and felt his love for me, a powerful experience of connection to my Saviour through his hands.

My strength called to me. I did not back away. I fell into the torrent of my Creator. When I awoke, my world came with a new hue. My problems still lay before me but changed. My eyes saw what they would not before. The Never Beginning wove in among them with His power.

The mess did not get neater. Yet something changed. I saw the part that I could address today. This one part. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake and find it destroyed again. But today, tonight, I will sleep and have seen the grand buttresses beneath the rubble, the perfection of the Creator which no amount of spoiling can totally obscure. The hand of the engineer as artist, the artist as engineer. I see His hands beneath my own. I feel my competence in the reflection of his glory.

Later, many days, I am given to worry the system, the interconnections. I untangle the weave that had seemed so impentratable. In that day I see the use of the endless work I took in repairing the same breach, day after day. I see that I had been wrong: I was not Sisyphus, the work had meaning, I did not see the end.

Today, today you take a small step into the warm terror of godliness, of grace.

Perhaps this is meaningless. It is my own. For me, to see my own competence, to write one well-constructed procedure, to solve a problem for a customer, to recognize and know the patterns in the drifting snow; these are my competencies shown. I create, and see the face of the Increate hidden beneath my own, a reflection, a shadow.

Perhaps my experience is merely that, and my own alone. I must see each day some delight, take some joy, tumble through His terrifying mercies.

What, today, do you delight in, friend?