Of necessity, our imagination must embrace the dark reality of ‘what is’ as a precursor to ‘what could be.’ For then and only then will we see in the darkness of today the certain light of tomorrow.

Without the ‘dark’ I would never understand how light the ‘light’ really is. And while I don’t care for the dark, I do appreciate what it does for the light.

I huddle in the dark with a mass of burnt matches strewn at my feet. And yet, for all of those matches I’ve not been able to light a single candle. And huddled in such deep darkness, I’ve somehow yet to realize that Christmas made both matches and candles forever obsolete.

The greatest light is that which shows us how dark our own light really was.

Without the darkness would we truly understand the light as being light?

I have repeatedly found that the darkness is often the thickest at the very moment that it is about to perish at the hands of the light.

Have you ever stopped to consider the absolute absurdity of paying good money for a lamp that wasn’t built to be lit? Yet, in our lives we do that every day and then we wonder why it’s always dark.

Stand up and be the light that God created you to be. Stand with me and the millions of others like both of us who have bowed before this inexplicably marvelous God of ours and in the bowing have begged that He not let us die until the darkness in the world around us has died first.

If we choose to make the darkness our light we must ascribe Christmas to the genre of childish myths of the most mythical sort, for that is the only way to make it dark enough for us to tolerate it.