Whatever the depth of our darkness, God navigated it eons before it was dark. And whatever the duration of our nights, God was there long before it ever turned to night. Therefore, despite our frequent feelings to the contrary, there is no place we might be where God was not lovingly waiting for us an eternity before we got there.

There’s something demanding about the stillness of the night; as if it knows our need for rest and demands that we have it. And if I impale the stillness with the incessant noise and raucous clamor of a mind ever ill at rest and in doing so I refuse to let the night bring what it does, the night will remain still but my soul will not.

There’s something about a warm summer night where all the boundaries of the world seem to fall to the softness of moonlight and crickets. And with the astonishing expanse of the entire world having drawn within arm’s reach, I realize that nothing is so far from where I am that it can’t be affected by who I am.

Despite how dark it might be, what is tonight but the precursor to tomorrow?

Do you want to make the darkness around you seize up in fear? Pray. For prayer is the soul turning the dark of a long night into the light of a forever day.

Some days it seems that the sun never rises and that we are left wandering in a darkness so thick and palatably cold that a thousand suns could not abate it. Yet, it is not a matter of darkness or light. Rather, it’s about believing that darkness may have its day, but light has all of eternity.

When the sun begins rubbing the eastern horizon warm with the first pastel-thin light of a new day, I am reminded that the sun had to let the world go dark before it was sufficiently positioned to make the world become light.