The season’s first real snow came in the other night to my county here in the Midwest. I was visiting a friend a few hours away so when I was driving back late the other evening I got quite the eyeful.
I guess the clouds that carried the snow in finally moved out of the area, leaving the ground totally covered and the skies completely clear. As I said before it was late in the evening, so in these rural parts I was literally the only car I saw for probably half an hour. Without the distraction of headlights and without any cloud cover, the moon all grand and luminescent, it was one of the most magically bright nights I have seen and amazingly enough, and I’m not kidding, I could see fields six miles away.
Incredible.
Bright snowy nights like that make me feel all wild.
I love feeling wild when I have put no effort forth to feel that way. When it just happens to me, rather than because of me. I was caught off guard by how very strange it was to be out in the middle of the night, and yet able to see everything.
Almost like I had night vision.
Wolves have night vision, did you know that? That’s one thing about them that I love: They are not at a disadvantage once the sun goes down. I realized tonight how very much humans are at a disadvantage, and how very much we are affected by what we can SEE. We base our feelings, our decisions, and our judgment of outcomes primarily by that which we can view with our own eyes. Is it any wonder, then, that “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see?” Because “hope in something that is seen is no hope at all.” It makes perfect sense then that we are called to have faith in what we do not see since we have more fear about the unseen than about almost any other kind of life obstacle.
My father always said that we should “worry about what you know, not about what you don’t know.”
What a good lesson. So much of life is spent fretting about things that have yet to pass, or things where we don’t feel like we have all the details. The whole picture, if you will. But what if we only allowed ourselves to “fear” that which we could see, and thus pray for those such things? For the immediate things in front of us that need grace to be dealt with NOW, trusting that all things will in fact be brought to light when they NEED to be seen. Of course I don’t think it is wrong at all to pray about the future, the UNSEEN, I just need to remind myself to PRAY about the unseen, rather than fear it.
As I was driving along I found myself thinking how great it would be if the darkness did not put me at a disadvantage. Sometimes I look around the world and I see so much darkness; hatred and bitterness and raging sin and blasphemies and all kinds of idolatries—darknesses, for sure—and I wonder how much better I would be able to handle the world if I could see through it. If the darkness wasn’t blinding. If I had night-vision like a wolf.
If dark was as light to me.
Hmm. I think I have heard that phrase before.
What a great God I serve. In that moonlit night I saw what it is like to see a few things through His eyes; eyes that are not hard-pressed by less than bright conditions. Eyes that don’t have to squint to make out shapes. He is not blinded by the darkness. What a comfort. In his eternal plans, the darkness does not come to him at a disadvantage, leaving him puzzled about exactly what to do next.
I found myself praying that this wild, untamed God would give me wild eyes that pierce the darkness just like his. I want to be able to see through the people I know who still dwell in the black. I don’t want their lifestyles to put my ministry to them in last place because I can’t make out the forests and the valleys of hurts and the areas of need. I do not want to be confounded by their darkness. I want to be able to see through their guise to know exactly where love and grace and truth will have a chance to penetrate. In loving people who are not lovers of God, my greatest prayer is that I can be a reflector, like fields of diamond snow, illuminating the big picture to people who walk in great darkness, revealing to them that light HAS dawned despite their existence in darkness and despite the visible world still full of inky shadows.
Can I just loudly say Praise be to God who pulled me out of all the blackness and who is absolutely not afraid of the dark???!!! Thank you, Jesus, for coming into those scary woods to find me, and to “rescue me from the dominion of darkness and brought me into the Kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Col. 1:13-14)
(Here are a few snapshots of what the darkness does not show you. Seriously, as my mother always would say, “Everything looks worse at night.”)
This is what it looks like outside my window right now:
Those lights are a car passing by on the road.
Here is what it looks like if I edit the picture:
Here is what it looked like yesterday morning; this is what the darkness is hiding:
And this is what it looks like in June; what the snow is hiding:
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