Looking Dark

It’s the fourth Sunday of Lent.

By now, it’s often getting a bit tedious for me. The Lenten practices I took up with such fervor have started to feel a little tiresome. Maybe you’re like me . . . we’re starting to miss our coffee or sugar or television or some other daily habit we gave up as a sacrifice. We’re missing the Alleluia every week at Mass. We’re wishing we could fast forward a little and just get to Easter already.

No matter how much we sacrifice, we can’t change who we are. Sacrifice is hard. Holiness is hard. Following Jesus is hard. It’s easier to do what we want when we want to do it. We’re human, after all- preferring darkness to light for thousands of years now.

“And this is the verdict,
that the light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light . . . .”

Really, we’re not that different from the people that surrounded Jesus during His lifetime. We, too, prefer darkness to light. It’s comfy in the dark—we can hide there, and it’s easier to keep things to ourselves that we’d rather not share with the general public.

We still have some miles to go on our Lenten journeys. The darkest days still lie ahead, where we will be confronted with the truth about ourselves—that when the Light was here with us, we feared it so much that we tried to extinguish it by nailing it to a cross.

We tried, and we thought we’d succeeded. Things looked terribly dark when Jesus died.

But there’s hope.

In spite of everything, in spite of our ongoing determination to choose darkness over light, God still thinks we are worth saving.

“God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love He had for us, brought us to life with Christ . . . For by grace you have been saved through faith,
and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast . . . For we are His handiwork.”

God made us. God loves us. God wants to redeem every one of us. And the Light couldn’t be put out forever.

Thanks be to God.

Abbey Dupuy is a freelance writer and homeschooling mama to two-year-old twins, a first grader and a new baby. You can find out more about her here.