It’s January.  The holiday hangover has set in.  The hope of December turns to face the bleak, cold challenge of the new year.  The short daylight hours feel limiting in every way, and test our resolve to be joyful for the blessings that were so apparent just a few weeks ago.

We attribute many positive characteristics to light, but have you ever considered the total darkness that exists in our lives year round?

With the exception of our eyes, the inside of our bodies function in total darkness.  Babies are conceived and grow in total darkness.  Numerous creatures inhabiting caves or near the ocean floor live their entire lives in total darkness.  And if not for the sun and stars, Earth would spin in total darkness.

We don’t usually ponder life in physical darkness, though we actively reject the spiritual darkness that surrounds us.  These days it seems to lurk in ever-closer proximity.

As Christians, we celebrate salvation while downplaying the conditions that make it necessary.  In church, testimonies are personal stories that end with redemption, which is the sole focus of them.  It’s not a testimony without the big finish.  Otherwise, it’s just your sad, pathetic saga of lostness (“… Call me when you get that worked out, okay?”).

We value the spiritual journey only if the pilgrim finds his way to Christ.

We say “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but if we equate lostness with sin, we hate the sinner’s experience … we hate his life.  And by extension, we may hate our own.

I’m not saying we should value sin (like the Apostle Paul facetiously asking if we should sin more to receive more grace), nor am I suggesting we should cherish spiritual darkness as if it were divine light.

I am saying that in this world, darkness is the dominate reality.  If not, Jesus could have stayed home.  We don’t have to like darkness but we need to appreciate that our Savior works through it.  That doesn’t make darkness good, rather it makes it a powerful tool of an omnipotent God.

Christians are not born, we are made anew, and we all come out of a rookery of darkness.  Our own experience tells us that future believers are there now.

If we reject the lost until they embrace us, we’ve only made the darkness darker for them.

Becoming a new creation in Christ does not erase our past, rather it liberates us from it.  And the transforming of our minds does not alter past events, instead it gives us a new perspective on them.  But the polar night of our existence persists even if we no longer live below the horizon.

Denying the darkness from which we came – which continues to surround us – does not make us better Christians, but dishonest disciples.

Without the foundation of sin, our new lives lack meaningful contrast.  Our shadows point to the Light.  Salvation from the darkness is part of every believer’s experience, and our credibility is rooted in owning our true condition – for ourselves and for others.

It’s Christian mythology to think our eventual citizenship in Heaven spares us from an intimate relationship with earthly darkness here, or that being a good Christian requires amnesia.

We can rightly say that the mean, deceitful, wicked people in this world are lost.  But let’s not be so eager to separate ourselves that we abandon them to the darkness, as if it’s Satan’s exclusive domain.  It is not – God is there, too.  That is where He found you and me.  And it’s a lot easier for the lost to see Him when we have the courage to stand in the darkness and hold a candle for them.