Oh Lord, you are my lamp. The Lord lights up my darkness. 2 Sam 22:29 (NLT)
Lord Lights Up My Darkness – The Storyteller Series – Part 5
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7
We spend much of our lives trying to be good. Denying the bad, rejecting the negative, chastising the disobedience and striving for perfection. We don’t want to talk about sin. It's bad. It's unholy. It's something that separates us from God. It's something to be ashamed of.
But sin is a part of my story.
How about you?
It’s still present in my life. I can’t seem to get away from it. Yesterday, I yelled at my kids. This morning I told a lie to my mechanic. (shock, horror.) It should be a part of the conversation. It should be a part of the story.
With King David, we shouldn’t ignore the bad things he did. We shouldn’t gloss over them, or pretend that they didn’t matter because hey, he was “God’s anointed.”
He started out as a nobody, the youngest, a pest. Then, he killed Goliath, and his brothers hated him for it. Then, he won the kingdom beauty Michal, but she ended up hating him too. Yes, he worshiped and wrote prolifically – his voice and songs calmed the insanity within his predecessor Saul, but he was still hunted. He lived in caves, his friends were outcasts. He fought and killed and was ruthless and merciless. And that was just the beginning. David lived a full life and experienced much more than most of us would want to. His kingship cost him dearly, and the blood he spilled stained his soul. This man who had “a heart after God” was also the man that God would not allow to build the temple: his hands were too bloody for something so holy…
This is a man more like the flawed leaders we have around us. More like ourselves. Sinner and saint, human and holy, broken and redeemed.
What do we do with the bad parts of the story? What do we do with the moments where we fail, make bad choices, hurt those we love, make a fool ourselves, give in to temptation, act on our selfishness and hatred, are abused and used up, feel the full force of someone else's bad choices? What do we do with violence and war and tension and poverty and hopelessness?
What do we do with the darkness?
Own it. Include it.
No amount of wishing it wasn’t there or pretending that it isn’t, will remove it from our lives. There is no special prayer you can pray to obliterate it. We cannot yet go back in time to re-live the moments we lived-wrong and make them right. We must learn to sit with the darkness, and somehow make peace with it.
“Oh Lord, you are my lamp. The Lord lights up my darkness.” 2 Samuel 22:29 (NLT).
David didn’t write, “The Lord lights up THE darkness.” He owned it.
“The Lord lights up MY darkness.”
There is no shame in owning your darkness. We all have it. We’re all know it's there. The temptation is to ignore it. But that only gives it greater power. The way to overcome the darkness is to expose it.
Brené Brown says, “When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.”
When we try to cover up, shrug off, or ignore the darkness at play in our lives, we will always live in the shadows of our sins and misfortunes, under a cloud of shame. But when we own it, take responsibility for it; when we listen to our lives and acknowledge the darkness that exists; when we sit with it and open the books of our lives up to the light of God (2 Sam 22:15), we get to set the course for the days and months and years to come.
When God is divinely writing our story with us; when the Infinite is in the ink and the paper and the pen of our life’s story, then both the journey and the ending (which is only a new beginning) will be nothing short of miraculous.
Darkness and all.
Do you allow your darkness to be a part of your story? Leave us a comment below.
Go to Part 6 – Things Happen »
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