Finding light in the darkness

SOUL FOOD

It was a dark and stormy night. And a dark and stormy morning.

A week ago Monday, like so many in Orange County, I woke to a

world without power.

I had planned to work -- before anyone else was awake, before the

newspapers hit the driveway, before the phone started ringing -- in

the ordinary quiet of an ordinary early morning. But I woke, instead,

to a conspicuous darkness and quiet, except for the relentless howl

of wind.

Overnight, high winds had snuffed streetlights, porch lights and

lamps along with the ever-present buzz of appliances. Like Rip Van

Winkle in reverse, I had fallen asleep in the 21st century and woke

up 100 years earlier in a world without electricity.

I found a flashlight. The morning was indeed dark. Very dark. I

got my Bible and sat with it in my lap. Let there be light, I

thought.

The emergency power supply on my desktop computer, where all my

working files were, had run out while I slept. The operating system

on my laptop, where I might recreate my files, had been crashing with

every boot. Its battery was close to dead.

No computer, no files. No files, no ... I didn’t even want to

think about how long it might be until our power was restored. I

wasn’t prepared for this. I was inclined to go back to bed.

But the uncommon stillness seemed to demand something else. OK,

God, I thought, I’m unplugged. Are you talking to me?

A few words from a once-popular song came to mind. “You are the

sunshine of my life ... .” Not scripture. Not even a hymn. Stevie

Wonder. How, I wondered, does a blind man grasp sunshine, or the idea

of someone, or something, brightening one’s life?

I thought of my cat, Mitzi. A friend had dubbed her Helen Keller.

She was deaf and blind until her last days, but she still brightened

at things ... a trusted hand, a sun-warmed tile, me coming into the

room.

Helen Keller, the woman, said reading the Bible gave her a deep

and comforting sense “that things seen are temporal and things unseen

are eternal.”

The Bible says this: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,

the evidence of things not seen ... By faith we understand that the

worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen

were not made of things which are visible.” Hebrews 11:1, 3.

Among the stories in scripture is one about a blind man whose

sight Jesus restores. Jesus’ disciples ask him, “Teacher, whose sin

caused him to be born blind? Was it his own or his parents?”

And Jesus tells them, “His blindness has nothing to do with his

sins or his parents’ sins. He is blind so that God’s power might be

seen at work in him.” And he heals him.

I have at times wondered if Keller ever wondered why that man’s

sight was restored, but not hers. It doesn’t seem that she did. There

is a story that, when once asked if being blind wasn’t the worst

thing in the world, she answered, “Not half so bad as to have two

good eyes and see nothing.”

Which is just what many biblical stories seem to say. They speak

of spiritual blindness, blindness of the heart ... of the mind.

“Whoever hates his brother is in the darkness; he walks in it and

does not know where he is going, because the darkness has made him

blind” John wrote. (1 John 2:11)

Paul wrote, “Walk not as other[s] walk ... having the

understanding darkened, alienated from the life of God ... because of

the blindness of their heart.” (Ephesians 4:18)

And Peter wrote, “Do your best to add goodness to your faith; to

your goodness add knowledge; to your knowledge self-control; to your

self-control add endurance; to your endurance godliness; to your

godliness add brotherly affection; and to your brotherly affection

add love. These are the qualities you need ... whoever does not have

them is so shortsighted he cannot see.” (2 Peter 1:5-9)

Keller said she could see through her blindness -- through what

others sometimes called the dark -- “a God-made world,” and she

described what she saw as “golden.”

God, I’m sure, heard my prayer Monday morning. “Let there be

light.” Let there be light in my home. Then he gave me another, “Let

there be light -- most of all -- in my heart.”

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].