Faith

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NIGHT’S SONG



Early morning used to be a quiet time, a reflective time in my life. In my single-parent household, caring for four lively little orbiting worlds, the only peacefulness I could capture for my own came from rising in the wee hours. Hours when darkness still laid its downy comfort of sleepfulness about my children. Into that deep, that stillness bearing night’s song, I would rise and sit at the LORD’s feet.

I don’t know how it changed. Why it changed. Now that I should have so much time to avail myself of that Table in the Presence, I still rise in darkness just before dawn, but I forget to seek out the light.

Quieting my heart gets trampled in the stampede of sameness.

So on my way to my car last week, arms overloaded as always, I hurriedly stepped out my front door into pre-dawn’s embrace. I was unprepared to find light waiting … with beacons of remembrance.

Though I don’t live out in the middle of nowhere (wish that I wish), I still live close to its fringes. But even here ‘city lights’ spill unwelcome into night’s fabric.

Not last week. Not at that moment.

A few steps from my door my feet froze, my breath caught in my throat … and Light spoke.

The blackness overhead, peppered with brilliant beacons, demanded remembrance.

Remembrance that once a dark veil spread emptiness across the face of all things. It’s purpose? To hide truth, to keep it away, to bathe itself and all with it in forgetfulness … that it might live to self.

A Voice spoke into that veil placed by another’s desire. Three simple words … followed by a fourth … and forever foiled a plan.

“Let there be … LIGHT! ”

So there I stood, transfixed by a forgotten revelation now whispering overhead.

Darkness, no, a deep unfathomable blackness, a void stretching well beyond horizon to horizon wrapped, wanted or not, around me.

Into darkness, so deep, so disturbing it could be tasted, fell an awareness.

Darkness didn’t bind me. Didn’t hold me prisoner.

Across the heavens, pinpoints of brilliant light, minuscule in proportion to the canopy they pierced, paved a path my feet could follow … without stumbling.

I’ve often reflected on the ways of God, there in the beginning.

When darkness spread over the surface of the deep … when God’s Spirit hovered over those waters … when God spoke into the choosing of another, “Let there be …” why didn’t He simply remove the darkness?

Gazing overhead, I think I understand … at least a beginning of understanding.

It’s all about Love … about Love’s gift.

About free-will. About choosing.

It always has been… always will be. Even before clay breathed.

God chose, in that beginning of beginnings, not to remove … but separate … that I might see the eternal difference. Recognize the vast gulf between the two natures. Know the wondrous piercing-power of light. And choose it for my own.

I needn’t ever stumble in the darkness. Needn’t believe its message, be bound in its black lies. Some day, Light will remove darkness … forever. Until then, it remains. Defeated. Light-pierced.

Looking upward, a redemptive song, falling softly from tiny pinpoints of light, breaks through a canvas otherwise black.

My breath catches … then flies free … joining the angelical chorus written in stardust across the heavens.





© DeAnna Brooks
27 September 2007

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