This morning, I woke up later than usual. I’m one of those people whose circadian rhythms run deep, which made this abnormal but not unexpected given the dim light of impending storms.
Making my way downstairs and making my coffee, my mind began to spin up: songs began playing in the background, to-do lists for the day began forming, prayers began being breathed as people and situations came to mind. I caught up on daily tasks on a phone game I play. I read Heather Cox Richardson’s letter from last night. And I began to notice it was getting darker — not lighter — outside.
Much darker.
I turned on some lights as my youngest made her way downstairs, and we began together her morning rituals.
Within minutes, the thunder began.
Now I don’t know if this is a universal thing, but I’ve noticed a pattern with most of my children: things that are scary at night are often not so during the day (or at least less so).
At night, my youngest is terrified of storms. Clashes of thunder and flashes of lightning right as she is laying down to sleep are sure-fire ways to guarantee a lousy night’s sleep for the rest of us. Should they wake her during the night, she is not likely to fall asleep until they subside. But this morning — even in this artificial darkness — she was unfazed.
There’s something parable-like in this that God seems to want me to learn, and to share as I wrestle with it. It seems to me that our deepest fears, our scariest catastrophizing, and the world’s worst savagery are all at their most paralyzing within certain contexts…… and in other contexts, we are better able to manage those fears and move through them.
And I wonder if what often holds us in a constant state of emotional emergency might be that we have forgotten the difference between the artificial darkness of a storm-clouded sky and the actual darkness of a moonless night.
And I wonder whether remembering that darkness is not night might somehow empower us to realize that most of the time the context that gives our deepest fears their power is not the context in which we are living.
It also seems that sometimes in life things get darker when we expect them to get lighter. Even when we know this is going to happen — when we see the “signs” — it may not be any easier. In the scripture-story, God told Noah the rain was going to fall for days and days and days. Sometimes in our lives, the storms seem unending; it seems the very world cannot contain it all. But even in Noah’s story the rain comes to an end, and God’s promise is that any storms we face always will too.