Hearing the Call

A few months ago I was listening to a mixed tape my friend Emily made me back in college (yes, I still have them and yes, my car has a cassette player!) and the Indigo Girls song "Closer to Fine" came on.

I know this song by heart.  I have known this song by heart since I was a teenager. I used to play and sing this song on my guitar...I know it intimately. 

But somehow I had never heard one part of it.  Somehow on this one sunny day driving along in my car on my way to somewhere, the lyrics reached up an slapped me in the face. 

Well the darkness has a hunger that's insatiable

And lightness has a call that's hard to hear

STOP. Rewind.  Play again. STOP.  Rewind, Play again.  Because it is true.  And I had never internalized it. 

I can't remember what darkness was hovering around me at that time; it's always something or other.  It is, as they say, insatiable.  There is so much truth packed into those two little lines.  The darkness will not leave.  It's here.  It's here when church members are massacred because they are black and it's here when a black man murders white people on live television and invokes a race war and it's here  when students are shot in their classrooms or moviegoers are shot in theaters.  It's here in the sexual trafficking, persecutors beheading Christians, consumerism that worships the thing above all else. The darkness is here. 

In the heaviness of this, the lightness does have a call that has to fight for attention.  But it's there just as legitimately as the darkness.  Today I told Finn that there are more good people in the world than bad people.  "Are you sure?" he asked me.   Yes, I am sure.  I am positive.  We're all good somehow--or so I believe--but the darkness can take root and grow into something monstrous. 

So we shine a light in the dark.

Jesus told us this life was going to be painfully difficult but I can find peace in Him.  He has overcome the world.  The lightness does have a call that's hard to hear.  Can we hear it, and mirror it, and shine it into a dark world?  

Start with the person in front of you and go from there.  A child, spouse, parent, sibling, student, colleague, cashier, email recipient...or perhaps the person in front of you right now is the person in the mirror. Starting there can be best of all.

Just take this day and shine some light into the darkness. Hear the call.