When the light turns on, the darkness becomes inconsequential. The glory appears in the brilliance of the light. It’s all in your perspective.

I confess, I’ve been lost in the shadows for awhile. I can’t explain why I let the light hide. I can’t explain why I couldn’t find it, but I lost track of it somehow. I let my pen fall silent. The same pen, I’ve so often prayed to “be a pen in the hand of a ready writer”, as the Psalmist says (Psalm 45:1), I tucked away deep inside of myself. I soaked it in tears. I allowed my story to become a side plot in someone else’s book.

I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t know that we ever really possess that capability. We’re all walking through our journeys with different points of reference, different experiences, different packs strapped to our backs carrying the remnants of yesterday’s climb. That’s where empathy comes in. When our understanding falters, we can choose to hear. We can choose to dig deep with compassion and find the eternal spark in each other. The humanity veiling divine destiny in another person can lead us to love deeply even when we don’t get it. But I digress.

I feel like I’ve, too often, used the phrase, “It’s been a hard season.” It’s a great Christian cliché to hide behind. Mainly, because this time, I’m sick of it. I don’t want to say it all again. I don’t want to admit that I’ve been wandering around in the desert for forty years in the same shoes. Now I’m realizing that maybe I needed the desert to find the sun.

If the eye is the lamp of the body (Matthew 6:22) and Jesus is the light of the world (John 8:12), and He lives in me, shouldn’t I be seeing things through His perspective and not my own limited one? Shouldn’t I be shining the same light to others instead of closing my eyes tight and thinking if I don’t look, maybe it will all disappear? Shouldn’t I be holding my head high in the middle of the struggles, knowing that He’s got me?

Maybe I can stand again, pull up my socks, lace up my boots, and continue walking. Maybe I need to stop and rest and breathe in the moments that make me human. Maybe I need to trust. I am surrounded by light.

So I throw these words into the air defying the silence. They may not mean anything to you, but to me, they mean I’m alive. To me, they mean I’m done wandering. To me they mean, I will fight for myself, strengthened in weakness, until I become who I really am. To me, that’s enough.