light.

I haven’t been writing much lately and I have missed the therapy of it. So tonight I’ve intentionally sat here, searching through my exhausted and slightly numbed mind for a topic. I’ve circled around somehow to a conversation I shared with a friend of mine over a year ago.

At the time, I was in a similar place of confusion and chaos. And I was forced to admit to my friend that I wasn’t using the gifts God had given me and that I wasn’t doing what I knew He was calling me to do. The familiar truth is—I was doing my best to stay as far away from God’s voice as I could.

My confession was met with compassion, but also with stark clarity. Katy, he said, this feeling you have—you feel empty and dark? This is the feeling you have when you are away from the light of God.

The transparency of that statement, at that moment and with that person—it cannot be overstated. Its raw truth broke something inside of me. Shattered was the habitual apathy I had begun to feel for myself, a feeling so foreign to my natural being that of course I was out of touch and empty. In its place was a much more painful reality. Through guilt or fear or plain fantasy, I had hidden my need for God in my daily life. Hidden it even from myself.

I’ll be honest—I had tried to cover up God. I covered Him with hateful words and hateful thoughts, directed equally at friends and family and myself. Here, my friend was saying, here is where you end up if you live that way.

In different words than these, he went on to say how he was brought up to know that God gives each of us these wonderfully unique gifts. Rolled up inside of us are our own special God-stories that He means for us to unravel and unleash in this world.

I’d love to say that recognizing my pain led me right back into that God-light, but actually it drove me farther away. At least at first. But my experience and opinion is that, in life, the unraveling far outweighs the unleashing. At least at first.

I’ve found that sometimes God’s paths for us intersect the ones we try to make alone. And we find these moments of intersection in places or ways or people that leave us pleasantly surprised.

But other times, I’ve found that we have to turn around and retrace our steps. We have to walk back through the darkness; this time with an intent and purpose that we didn’t carry with us the first time. And these U-turns can leave us shaky and unsure and even angry. Why wouldn’t God sweep in, take us up and turn us around at the first sign of swampy ground?

But I remember poetic writings in ancient books that speak to me about God having gone before me in all these trials. There are lessons and there is life in our dark, swampy, marshy areas. His is not merely a story of a saved people, but more completely a story of a redeemed people. And mine will never be a story of an enlightened person, but more completely the story of a person who chooses to step out of darkness.

“We will not fear…

…though the earth give way and

the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,

…though its waters roar and foam

and the mountains quake with their surging.

There is a river

whose streams make glad the city of God,

the holy place

where the Most High dwells.

God is within her,

she will not fall;

God will help her at break of day.”

-from Psalm 46