Mar 27 2019 Psalm 119: 97-120

Your word is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path.
This morning, I woke up at 2:40AM. As I lay in bed, thoughts of my busy day, busy weekend, unpredictable demands, ability to cope crowded the space for sleep. Laying in the darkness, I conjured up all sorts of worry and drama. Some of the things I worry about are real, today challenges. Some of the things are fabricated possibilities about the future. In both cases, laying in bed, in the dark, fretting, is stupid. 

Sleep evaded me until I finally got up at 4:00. It’s dark, and surprisingly still. I got my morning coffee, grabbed my computer, and headed for my prayer chair. I turned on the small table lamp from my grandparents house and settled in, as I do every morning. The darkness view out of my apartment window is a bustling city, a river, and interstate in the distance. It’s still, compared to commute hours. So as I sit in the dark stillness, I’m thinking about light. 

It’s the unknown in the darkness that frightens me. I can’t see where I’m going. I don’t know what’s out there. And in the still darkness, my crazy brain takes over and conjures up all sorts of narratives about my current situation, and worse – what’s to come.

As I sit here, I have faith that Mt. Hood is still beyond the city lights I can see, and with sunrise, I’ll be able to see the mountain in all its glory. The shadows will be brightened. The unknown alit. And for now, I sit with my small light, which is just enough, and sit with scripture, and all is well. 

I have been struggling with newly diagnosed vestibular problem. Sometime over a decade ago, I had damage to the nerve connecting one ear to my brain, resulting in years of faulty signals from one side of a finely tuned tw0-ear balance system. I don’t recall the illness or injury that caused it, but over the years, my balance has gone from bad to worse, with increasingly frequent bouts of vertigo. The interesting (and relevant) thing is that my balance was absolutely nonexistent in the dark. No chance of biking without falling over – it’s a thing – and I couldn’t walk without holding on to someone more stable. I’ve retrained my brain to disregard the faulty signals, and I’m mostly healed. 

I encounter darkness in three different ways. Darkness affects the stimulation and thoughts of my head. In the absence of other sights and inputs, darkness leaves my head to wander, both for good and not-so-good. God’s light can break that internal chatter that occurs in the dark. I have, with occasional success taken the opportunity to pray in those dark sleepless times. The limited success is due to my stick-with-it-ness, not with any perceived failure of prayer. 

I also interact with darkness as an observer. As I sit in the light, looking out at the dark night, I can’t see Mt. Hood. I worry about bad guys in the darkness. God’s word helps me see things I cannot see, helps me not worry about bad guys or anything else that the darkness hides. 

Finally, darkness affects my ability to walk a straight line without falling over. Or at least it did. Now, I might not fall over, but it’s still harder to walk and navigate in the dark. I do genuinely have a sense that God’s truth and love help me navigate better through this complicated world, sometimes so filled with darkness it’s hard to walk a straight line. But like the psalmist writes, God’s word is a light on my path. 

Today, I want to try to see all the places where God’s word does lighten my world, to see where there’s darkness, and to reflect God’s light in those dark places, to light the path of others.