Sonlight Shining Through the Cracks

Last Friday, a blog reader I didn’t know I had reached out to check on me. I told him I’ve been writing a blog entry in my head for weeks, and I knew it was time to write it down and share it with you.

I wrote most of this entry on my lunch break that day, sitting at my cluttered kitchen table next to the window. The sky was a dull gray, and I felt too chilly to venture out for a much-needed walk in the park. Even so, I didn't feel as down as I might have felt a week or two before.

Over these last weeks of forced isolation, God has been working a transformation in me. Actually, it started before COVID-19 locked us all in our homes.

Ever since I started working again in early January, I’d gradually been feeling better in mind and body. The daily warm greetings from my friend Laura, and the repartee between her, myself, and our colleagues gave me a reason to get out of bed and pack up all my meals, drinks, and snacks each day.

One area of my recovery lagged behind, though. I missed my old closeness with Jesus dreadfully, and I often cried when I prayed about it. Because of all the struggles I’d been through over the preceding six months, I often found myself listening, if only for a moment, to my enemy’s constant refrain: “Maybe He really isn’t good. Maybe He can’t be trusted.” 

Oh, I knew at my core that those were lies, but the fact that I entertained those thoughts at all wounded me deeply. My Beloved never held my weaknesses against me, but continued to give me wondrous assurances of His love. 

For example, one difficult morning when I was upset over recurring pain in my joints, traffic pushed me onto a different route to the office. Moments later, I spotted this sign just as I was crying over those exact lyrics in a song that had just come on the radio. 

I'm Gonna See a Victory
For the Battle Is His

Next, He gave me a new revelation through my latest memory passage. After months of meditating on it, I realized I needed one more verse for context. I had started with 2 Corinthians 4:7, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay…”

“What treasure?” I asked myself. And then I became enthralled with verse 6, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”

That is our treasure, we the broken jars. It’s light in the darkness--in our darkness. The light has just one source, knowing Jesus, the light of the world. The really amazing thing is that God uses us to carry the light to others. The darker it is around us, the more his light can shine out of us, even when it feels like the deepest darkness is inside of us. All it takes is a tiny bit of light to pierce the darkness.

After that verse came alive to me, I started finding the same message nearly every time I opened the Bible. Here’s one passage that I remember marveling over during the last few precious minutes of a lunch break, as if it were the first time I’d encountered it: “In Him was life, and that life was the light of mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it…. The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:4-5, 14)

“Please, God,” I prayed. “There is so much darkness in me. Please let your light shine right in the middle of it.”

Then, at the end of January, my sister Melody surprised me with a precious gift which she left with my parents.

I’d requested a painting of a golden seed of light planted in the dark soil, with beams of light shining through cracks in the ground. In January 2019, God had given me that vision of myself during another dark time I endured in my old job as a teacher in a low-income middle school. 

When Melody found the time to paint, she couldn’t remember the details, so she created what she envisioned. The moment I saw it, I knew it was exactly what God had been speaking to my heart in recent months:

• I am like a tree planted by the water, with leaves always green and roots reaching down to the living water.
• His light shines in my darkness, both from above and from within.

“I believe your painting is prophetic,” I told her when I called to thank her. “The painting I asked for was how I was, but this is what I will be.”

It took me two days to find the title on the back of the frame. Oh, you won’t believe it!...

Sonlight. 

How beautiful is that? The painting is full of golden light, shining through me, the lush green tree. And the source of that light is the light of the Son, the light of all mankind, the glory that shines in the darkness.

How does God do that? 

Prophecy Fulfilled

A few weeks into the job, I found myself enjoying an unexpected belly laugh with my colleagues as we joked over a mildly sexy character named Jet that I had added to an interactive lesson, “a little something for our female learners.” (I mourned when I had to take Jet out; he was too distracting.) 

When I’d caught my breath, I told my friend Melodie that it was the first time in many months that I had laughed so hard, and just as long since I’d had the will to make jokes.

I told her the short version of my battle with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and the effects it has had on my emotional health. “Here, I feel almost normal,” I explained. “I can stop worrying about my health so much and just focus on my work. I don’t have time to worry about every ache and pain, so if I’m hurting, I don’t really notice it.”

I showed her and the other three colleagues in our little office the painting, which was always in view on my desk.

Melodie and Laura helped me put together this makeshift workstation from discards in the warehouse; the standing desk I had before was too tall. Our permanent cubes will be ready in a month or two.

“I went through some really dark days, but there was a seed of light planted in my heart and mind,” I explained. “I couldn’t feel it, but it was there under the ground, growing invisible roots. Now I feel like that light is breaking through the surface. And you guys are a big part of that.” I pulled a tissue from the box on my desk. “Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “One thing you should know about me is that I am a cryer.”

“That’s okay,” Melodie said, and I saw that her eyes were moist, too. She wrapped me in a warm hug, the kind I craved when I was alone and hurting on my couch.

Laura, who’d walked in at the tail end of the conversation, commented that she couldn’t get over the difference in me after such a short time. “You don’t seem like the same quiet woman who started with us on January 6,” she said. “The change in you has been remarkable.”

So you can understand why I cried when I realized I’d be working from home for weeks. The last thing I wanted to do was go back into my cave. 

God had other plans for me, though. The light inside me has continued to grow. Soon I will share a few of the wonderful things He has brought out of this time at home.