i'm choosing light this time

the sun is my anthem for 2025.

by @arozear on Instagram.

It’s 12 a.m. I’ve been zeroing in on my Pinterest board that will encapsulate, as much as a Pinterest board can, all of what I desire for 2025. I know, it’s a big task to place on something as limited as a technological ‘board’ primarily image-based. Maybe its not healthy, I don’t know, but something about crafting a small space where I can go back and remember what I am living for, what promises I cling to, in the form of images that appeal to my senses of beauty and artistry…I think it’s sort of wonderful in a lot of ways.

I’ve always been a visual person. My visuals give me vision for where I think I want to go from here. A brilliant sunrise-colored painting of Christ kneeling to meet the repentant man; graphic designs of gorgeous wavy suns; hands reaching for the blinding ray of light. These are what make up the pins for this particular vision board.

At 12 a.m, I decided that light would be what refracted and bounced about my life next year. Between various ideas and thoughts on what I wanted 2025 to perhaps become to me in future years, somehow sunlight seems fitting. This year, I created an entire board for crafting a life that resembled freedom, and indeed, lots of freeing happened in the past twelve months—none of it particularly pleasant experiences in the moment. But there was light. Not just waiting for me at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but light, here and now, always present.

There was light warming me from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes, although inside it felt like dead cold winter. There was the outline of my own personal sun following me no matter where I tread. It was the lack of recognition that was on my part, and I missed out. Which is why, I suppose, I want to purposely welcome light into my life starting now. Not January 1st, but today, this morning, at 12 a.m.

Hillsong has this captivating song I often have playing on repeat during Christmas time and honestly, all year long, called Seasons. If you’ve listened to Hillsong for awhile, or, more notably in my opinion, to Benjamin William Hastings, you’ve probably heard this lyrical tune. Some of the words go like this,

"Lord I think of Your love
Like the low winter sun
As I gaze I am blinded
In the light of Your brightness
Like a fire to the snow
I’m renewed in Your warmth
Melt the ice of this wild soul
Till the barren is beautiful."

Similar to the picture that sits on top this post, I want to choose Light. Light that emanates from within my soul, where Jesus resides.

Can you remember a time when light rays shot through in dazzling brilliance, lighting you from within like a sun thousands? There’s something royal about standing amidst the light that shines in a dim space, being shot through with an almost animating life force like sunbeams.

I particularly recall a memory from a few months ago that is nearly pungent in its raw and vulnerable state. Sitting on a swing in the neighborhood park, I basked in the strong ray of sunshine during an early autumn afternoon, shorts and t-shirt soaking up light like it was starving in the shadows. I tilted my head to gaze just past the point of light in the sky, and closed my eyes, permitting the heat to radiate across my face. The gentle rocking of the swing and the playing of the wind in my hair, while I held a book in my hand settled me in that moment. I was happy. I never wanted to leave this utterly perfect moment. Inwardly, I couldn’t have wished for more joy than what was flowing through me in abundance on that weathered children’s swing.

Something penetrated me in that elusive fragment of paradise. I almost caught it. But then, it wouldn’t be paradise if I could have really touched it.

Returning to Seasons, I wonder barren can be beautiful. It certainly hasn’t felt so during these brief winter days and seemingly endless winter nights. The doldrums set in and I feel like it’s almost a laconic state fixed within my body, stretching on and on forever.

Except the doldrums only reveal human inactivity and we ought not to conclude that also encompasses Divine deadness as well in spite of the world’s going dormant. I just wrote an article on winter and how to rest during this chilly season and one of the points I brought up was the theme of resting during the dead months. Sometimes, human inactivity is actually what we need more of and not less. Winter is a prime illustration of this hunch.

The thing is, God never rests and yet is always in a state of perfect peace because He is peace.

Light never ‘rests’ either. It does not retire from sight, even if at times it evades our capture. Even in the dead of night, you can turn on a light. Although the dull winter clouds crowd in and feel as if they are suffocating warmth, we can light a fire inside our dwelling and create a circle of hearth and home.

When I think of light, I envision warmth, almost an unbearable heat of a blazing fire that cannot be touched, no matter how cold we may feel inside. I see a radiance that is nigh impossible to stare straight into without blinding myself.

Light reveals and somehow blinds all at once. If stared too closely at, it removes our capacity to see anything at all, but if we neglect light completely, we will still be unable to see. There’s something in that which singularly makes me gasp in wonder and lift my eyes to the heavens, because it’s just a pattern in thousands where God’s paintbrush meets the canvas of creation and human rhythm.

Photo curtesy of Pinterest, photographer unknown.

light shines brighter in darkness

“And the light shines in the darkness, and darkness did not comprehend it.” - John 1:5

A recognition of light does not equal its magical creation in the moment of our recognizing it. That is what, precisely, makes the sun out of our reach and power—that it exists with or without our conceiving of it. I hearken back to this passage in The Silver Chair by the great Lewis, where we see Jill, Eustace, Puddleglum, and the lost Prince Rillian in the throes of an enchanted slumber cast upon them by an evil green witch: the Queen of Underland. In the midst of this enforced sleep, Puddleglum shouts out that he believes there is a sun, a Narnia, and an Aslan, and that even if there were not, yet he would still stand by his home country and his Leonine King, no matter if it ‘existed’ in functioning reality.

Seriously, one of my more favored passages in The Silver Chair, and I highly recommend that you read it yourself.

Light is always there. No matter our acknowledgment of it or no.

And it shines brighest after a violent thunderstorm which shakes the earth and rains down a torrent that sweeps away impurities. The sun comes out the stronger after the darkness night—it’s a promise that it will always happen this way, even if light touches us only after we’ve reached Eternity. We were never promised every single moment to feel like mine did sitting on that swing in the park, indeed rather the opposite.

But there is a hope for light. There is a hope that beams of dazzling brilliance will frighten the shadows away and that night will be more. Winter has an end, always. It cannot always be dormant, and it cannot always be dark.

It is in the deepest midnight when a single shaft of brightness is revealed to be so mighty, but we cannot fully appreciate the luminosity if we have not yet ever been in the abyss.

When light touches darkness, there is a shattering of the past and genesis of rebirth. Patterns and shapes that were once something in the blackness are no more in the fullness of day. The darkness can coexist with the light, surely, but it cannot exist in it’s complete form when even a pinprick of luminescence is present.

(I, of course, am not referring to ‘darkness’ as immorality and ‘light’ as morality only. I don’t ascribe to the Eastern idea of Yin and Yang nor that goodness and evil cannot exist without the other. Evil is primarily and only a privation or perversion of good. I do think that disease is a privation of health i.e. an evil, and lying is an evil as well as a sin. However there is another kind of ‘evil’ which often comes upon us in the form of bad feeling or unfortunate circumstances, which are not necessarily morally evil, but are evil in the sense that they are still a privation or a shortage of perfected humanity).

John says that the darkness could not even know light. These metaphors begin to look quite literal, in some sense of the word, although I hate to say ‘literal’ for anything at all, lest I be taken, well, too literally. But as far as it goes, these words help us. And in this way, darkness is itself a separate entity from holistic light, from the brilliance that Christ offers us. In the dead of the night, there will come a sunrise.

light cannot be overcome or captured

Like our attempts as kids to ‘hold’ water, capturing or covering up completely, anything which shines, is nearly impossible—especially if the shining itself comes from light.

No matter the darkness—the loneliness, exhaustion, bereavement, or pain—we feel, everything must answer to God, who is the Father of lights, where all perfected gifts originate. There is not one ounce of this world that is supremely ruled by darkness. If Satan is the ruler of this world, then there is the sense that God, in His sovereignty, allows for this. But his rays of glory cannot be dimmed by the shadowy forms that prowl this planet, whether it be in the depths of the ocean or the highest mountain peaks. “…even there Your hand shall lead me”.

Everything must ultimately be subsumed in the dread of His radiant glory that transcends logical experience. Numinous, the otherness of God, is what this light is and its source. Hope, faith, love, cannot be dimmed by the tragedies of the world at large, cannot be smothered or stamped out, no matter the darkness that encroaches at points in our own personal ventures or on a larger scale.

Another image comes to mind of somebody shading their eyes from the brilliance of a hot summer sun’s glare as we look out into the distant landscape. Or as we stare at the sun for too long and it is burnt into our irises for quite a few minutes. Once the light has been shed or uncovered, there is no returning to the darkness. It is far too late to be ‘un-saved’ by the grace of God, even if there were such a truth as that. Anybody who has touched the sun could not simply go back to living as one would in a cave far away. Light illuminates.

Photo curtesy of Pinterest, photographer unknown.

Doubtless, you’ve heard of the gold at the end of the rainbow. Not only is sunlight a substance unable to be captured, but it is elusive. That is what I meant earlier by the experience of light being almost akin to Paradise. It is in the chasing of this light to grasp it that we lose it. If we attempt to capture the firelight and in the process get burned, we lose the joy of warmth and a feeling of home inside, because now we are too focused on our burning fingers. Becoming obsessed with bottling the beams of sunlight only leads to a lesser fulfillment of those rays.

A basking is required. An open hand held high to soak in sunlight forgives us as we do our best to reach without actually grasping. Sunlight is elusive. Someday, it won’t be. Someday we will find that the Son himself is the centrality of light in our eternal existences (Rev. 22:5).

light will always come

& the sun will always rise.

self-explanatory in itself, nothing can prevent light from streaming in. Not only cannot it not be covered, but light, The Light, will find a way. In every chink and cranny in the heavy oppression you find yourself under, whether spiritual, physical, mental, or more normally, a combination of all three, don’t worry, He’s coming. There will be a dawn. No matter how deeply you feel that there is no getting out of this one, that this straw will break the camel’s back, please, hold on. We can sing alongside Lydia Laird, …even in the dead of night / there’s a guiding light / just keep holdin’ on.

I’m recalling that early morning/late night, 12 a.m., when I began this article, just a couple days ago. As I was scrolling through my Pinterest board and allowing the message of these specified images wash over, providing me with words to write with, the freedom that I desired for God to lead me to this year liberated me to even desire light, the pure sunbeams from the Son Himself. I desire His light like I desire air to breathe, because I have touched the darkness, and I truly fear who I could become without the light of Divinity surrounding me and flowing into me through regeneration of Christ Himself.

There are those who know what I mean, to have reached out and felt the clasp of the outer rim closing in about you, almost hearing the gnashing of teeth and feeling the flames that would destroy rather than illuminate. Hell is hell because it is separation from the Being we were made to be unified with for all of eternity. Sometimes, that separation is so keenly felt on earth where sin stains what is meant to be pure. Where, no matter how much light, there will always slither out of holes the ugly wisps of shadowy evil. Sometimes, those wisps even look like light. Counterfeits of the real.

But as faithful followers of Jesus, and reborn citizens of the Kingdom to come, the darkness inside of us is no match for the brilliance of His radiance that illuminates the straight and narrow, guides us along it, and expunges the inky blackness pervading our souls. As we are subsumed into His fullness, as the process of what the Orthodox Christians refer to as theosis is begun in us by the Spirit of God Himself, the stains we carry cannot even hold up in the light of Christ.

And so, no matter the darkness you feel inside, you know is living in the world around you, we must reach for the light, though it may be only a pinprick in the distance. The light of the Son is only a gasp of a prayer away. He does not need much from us to throw his rays of righteousness over our cowering shame. He does not need us to come before Him clean and spotless in order for us to worship Him. Indeed it is in the worship that our souls are purified so that our eyes may more readily see the light.

The sun will rise, again. Every morning of every day, in spite of the midnight in our hearts.

Photo curtesy of Pinterest, artist unknown.