Dark Matter

I've been thinking about darkness and light lately. For about a week or so, I suppose. And about the creation of the universe.

I don't know why. Sometimes, these thoughts just happen. It doesn't have to be for any reason in particular.

And I was thinking mostly about darkness, how it's so easy for us to get stuck in our darkness and feel empty. Like darkness and nothingness are two sides of the same coin. Like without the light, there is nothing. It's easy to get into your darkness and believe that even God has abandoned you, that God is in the light and since there's no light - not even at the end of the tunnel because there isn't a tunnel in the first place - there is no God. You get wrapped up in this defeat, this emptiness, and there is....nothing. Despair, maybe, but largely nothing. It is just void.

I have to admit I haven't thought much about darkness in a long time. I've been too busy dancing. But darkness is a place that once you've been there, your heart remembers what it was like. And you have this deep empathy for those still stuck in its vortex.

And I was trying to figure out how we get redemption from darkness. What is there for us, in that place where hope would be everything but there is no hope at all? In that place where a flicker of light would zap the darkness away, but we have no concept of light?

So I went back to the creation story.

In the beginning, light...was the SECOND thing God created. That's right - the second.

The first...was the Heavens and the earth. And the Bible tells us He created them, and they were covered in darkness.

It doesn't strike me as perfect logic. Logic would say that when you have nothing, you first have to have a way to see what that nothing is. You'd have to have light before you could form the nothing into anything. To create anything before light is illogical.

Illogical, but it is love.

Because what God is really saying is: "In the nothing, I am here. In the darkness, I am here. When all light has gone out, I have still placed the foundations of eternity beneath your feet. When you can't see them - and when you can't see me - I am still here with something to hold you."

That's awesome.

It's awesome because when you're in the thick of it, when you're trapped in darkness and the emptiness is sucking what little is left out of you and there is no hope and there is no light and there is no tunnel and there is nothing but void...God says, "I am there already."

He says before the void, He was. And in the void, He is. And next to you, He always will be. He says He stepped into the void and made something, even in the darkness, so that you would never be alone. So that when you couldn't see anything and you felt like the world was falling out from under you, you could still be sure that He was there...because He laid that world under your feet. He crafted it to hold you. He created it in the darkness specifically so you would know that when there seems to be nothing, there still is something.

In the dark, in the nothing, in the void...there is the foundation of all Heaven, the beginning of all Creation, and the indescribable love of the Father. In the void, there is wisdom. And there, there is eternity.