Several months ago, we took a day trip to the Linville Caverns with the boys. They're only minutes from home, but it was my first time going. The boys were excited of course and it was interesting...until the cavern walls started to close in on me, so I tried my best to stay in the larger open areas so that I didn't have a full fledged panic attack right there in the middle of the guided tour. But there is a part of the tour that you can't fully prepare yourself for...the part when they turn off the lanterns and the lighted path. They don't do it without warning. They give you a lovely, cheery {terrifying and horrific} story about two boys getting lost in the cavern long ago, but miraculously making it out alive two days later...and then they plunge you into complete and utter darkness. This is not a darkness that can ever be experienced above ground, it's not the dark of your bedroom in the middle of the night, or a dark basement with only a match for a light...it is the blackest dark, so dark your mind almost can't comprehend it, so dark that you almost forget how to breathe, so dark your eyes will never adjust.
As I stood there struggling to breathe, reaching out blindly trying to grasp ahold of my boys and Brandon and the baby (who slept soundly in the carrier against my chest the whole time), I began to cry. Brandon knew I was panicking and squeezed my shoulders tight, letting me know he was there and I was going to be just fine. But experiencing that darkness was the most terrified that I have ever been in my whole life. It felt as though I had been cast out by the Lord, that hell had swallowed me up. My heart and mind were screaming that I was a child of the light, that I didn't belong there in the darkness!
I don't think the tour guide had the lights off for more than a minute, just 60 short seconds, but they might as well have been years. I was so relieved to be able to see again, to look on the faces of my children and my husband, to see the path out of the cavern, narrow as it was. We hightailed it out of the caverns after that but that feeling of fear is one that I'll never fully forget and never want to relive again.
It's that same darkness that Satan seeks to devour us with.
I have written about our struggles with the darkest time in our lives many times. Burying a child is undeniably the most difficult and darkest season in a parent's life, one that scars and aches for a lifetime.
But what struck me this morning as I was studying in 1 John 1:1-10, was that Brandon and I had been in the dark long before the death of our son.
I can't put my finger on it exactly. I can't tell you specifically when it happened. I don't have a location. But at some point in my life, I gave up my struggle with the darkness. I stepped off the solid foundation that I had built upon the Lord, began my descent into the caverns, and let the darkness swallow me up. I stopped fighting the temptation, I gave into the struggle, and suddenly my life had done a 180 degree turn and it was nearly unrecognizable. Suddenly I was doing things that, as a young woman raised in church my whole life, I unequivocally knew were wrong, were sinful...but I pushed the shame down deep until I couldn't feel it anymore, and I let the feelings of popularity and being a part of the "in" crowd soothe those feelings of guilt and regret.
Mercifully though, the Lord eventually steered me in Brandon's direction and though the first years of our relationship can only be termed "riotous living," God saw fit to bring us together so that we might one day be where we are right now.
There was a purpose even in the darkness. A lesson to be learned, one that I can look back upon now and be thankful for. The struggle with the darkness and the temptation to sin, those are not sin - it's the giving over of one's self to the darkness that is sin.
As a Christian, I will always struggle with sin. John tells us in his letters that to deny that we have sin in our lives is to deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, to say that we have not sinned is to make Him a liar, and His Word is not in us. BUT if we confess our sins, He is just and faithful to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
I have to continue to fight against the darkness every day and walk in the light...for myself, for my children, for my marriage, for my Lord...because the moment I stop fighting against the darkness and evil of this world is the moment that comfortable feeling will begin to set in and I'll be descending into the darkness of those caverns once again.
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