Letting Light In

It's really easy, when you find yourself in a dark place to feel alone and like no one else can possibly understand. It's easy to feel like your brokenness is somehow a special kind of broken that is worse than everybody else's. But the reality is, we're all broken. I don't care who you are or what you have or haven't been through...we are all broken. It's the one thing I can guarantee we all have in common. Our brokenness is different. Our experiences and circumstances are different. But we are all broken and we all have wounds that hurt, whether we tend to them or not. 

When the hurt is more painful than we can stand and the world gets dark, it's really hard to let the light in. There's something about the darkness that sucks you in and grabs hold of you, trying to shake off any kind of hope you may have in you. And when you're in that darkness you have to fight to let the light in. It is so easy to get into a dark place and just wallow in it. And when you do that it just sucks you deeper into the darkness until that light gets smaller and smaller. It doesn't go away, but it's lucky to get in just a crack. 

I have learned over the last many years as I have struggled with my own battle of darkness and light that the only thing that heals us is light. The only way to conquer the darkness is with the power of the light. Light means different things to different people. For me, light is my faith. Light is knowing that there is a God who loves me no matter how much I hurt and that He wants me to be healed. Light is my friends who will sit with me, pray with me and just be with me and comfort me. Light is every good thing I have been blessed with that I can possibly think of in my moments of darkness. 

Light is sharing my story, knowing that someone else is hurting too and comforted knowing that what they feel is felt by other people too...hopefully letting them know that they're not as alone as they may feel. Because the darkness is lonely. It's isolating. We don't want anyone to see our brokenness and our pain. We want to fix it and pull ourselves together again and then we are worthy of being around others. That's how I feel, at least. Go in my dark hole, fix my brokenness and when I've got it to a presentable state, I can come back out and face the world again. It's hard to let people see us because there's that unknown: will they judge and criticize me or will they want to help me? Unfortunately, not everybody is interested in helping us. But I believe that's a risk we have to take. There's no healing in the dark, only when we bring our brokenness into the light can we really begin to heal.