longest night
Stretching from early evening to latest morn
the dark of the longest night wraps itself around me.
Reaching with fingers long and slow,
it seeps to my inside and only my spirit can say to this dark,
“You will not have me!”
I wrestle with its grip acknowledging a thick and heavy sadness.
Around me; cancer sucks life like a black hole in a dear friend,
and marriages tearing leave an inky chasm widening,
and miles of separation feel like an endless stretch of midnight between myself and those I love.
Death pulled others from my life this year into the cold, ebony earth and
even a drive through town gives witness to the gaping loss of hope as I pass strangers peering from the shadows of ramshackle tents along the road.
Is there any light?
Is there even a glimmer?
How can I see in all this enveloping dim?
My gloomy ruminations are pierced by shafts of light as I turn my thoughts towards another night.
The weight bearing down heavy on a young girl as she wrestled through the night to push the Light of the world from dark chambers of her own body.
And He emerged under shafts of starlight marking the epicenter of a cosmic shift from
hopeless black to endless light.
And if He came from a human womb, concealed in pitch black waters,
then The Light has been in human darkness.
And if The Light, 33 years later, would plummet to the depths of sunless separation from all the goodness and light of His Heavenly Father,
then would He be with us now in our own shadow days?
If He came from and went to the dark, and conquering it returned again,
has He not overthrown it’s power over us?
Even our longest nights can be inhabited by the abiding blaze of Love’s radiance.
Light that will be with us in our own black waters and starless nights and is known as Immanuel.
