dark – Aspirational Adventures

Beach on Thursday 19th September photographed by myself

Today is Equinox, the day when the hours of daylight are equal to the hours of darkness – or at least would be if it wasn’t pouring with rain here and just looking really bleak and wintery, which is why you get the photo from Thursday when the sun had only been up an hour or so.

My journaling this morning was that we can see equally the light and dark in our world. Sometimes what we really want is it to be all light and wonderful, blissful and good stuff. But life isn’t like that. Though neither is it all darkness, grief, dreariness and gloom.

So my prayers were for our media that can balance their stories of doom, gloom, wars, rumours of wars, death, the lack of care, and show that there are great interventions going on our world to help with climate change, with caring for each other, with peace, with support, with “holding the door open” type of stories.

But also I pray for social media which can be filled with the perfect couple, the perfect children, the perfect life, and so one can be left feeling inadequate, craving something unobtainable, or even not realising the pain the those FB “friends” because they think they can only post the extremes – the huge highs and for some the hidden lows.

I pray that our conversations will be filled with the truth – which is a mixture of light and dark, of coping and struggling, of joy and grief, of wanting to be noticed and of wanting to notice others.

I do think there are times we either try to ignore or overly focus on the dark because we don’t know what to do with it. Our subconscious is still dealing with fairy tales where the dark was where the evil monsters lay and the knight’s job was to defeat the dark. But if there was no dark when would we sleep, when would we dream, when would the plants have time to regrow. We need to darkness of the night, of grief, of sadness, as much as we need to light of day, of growth, of joy.

May today be filled with openness and honesty, truth and love, light and dark in all its facets.

Signs

Tonight I’m talking about The Wise men with my youth group. The points I want to look at are SIGNS and GIFTS so I thought I’d post about them.

The other morning the dog and I were out walking before the sun came up. As I looked to the East there was a full moon in a halo of clouds. All the clouds were on fire as they caught the rays of the sun that was still forty odd minutes away from coming over the horizon. This morning was a similar time but much denser cloud cover, and yet I could still see that the some of the clouds were lighter than others where they were again picking up that sun. But if I looked in a different direction then the sky was dark. There was no light at all.

I think the Biblical wise men were wise enough to be looking at the signs that the Jewish believers should have been looking at too. The Shepherds are amazed. They had not been taught about looking for signs. But these people from another land and another religion were looking at signs. They had not prophecies in their religion to tell them about a coming Saviour but they were looking to see what was going on. They were ready when it happened. They were also willing to walk, probably on camel, many hundreds of miles. [Google mapped the distance from Iran to Jerusalem and it is over 2000 miles and could take about 3 weeks – less distance than I thought but still interesting]

So these people took a couple of months out of their lives to journey to a foreign land and back again to worship a king that they had seen in the stars. Amazing.

Do we look for signs now? Or do we wait for someone to tell us? Are we like the learned men with Herod who had to get their prophecies out after the wise men had arrived? Are we willing to spend time looking for something we don’t even know is there but we have a faint inkling? There must have been something that the wise men saw that made them look at other things and come to the conclusion this was worth making a dangerous trek across the desert for.

So as I think about this I have to think am I willing to look at the signs and not just either listen to what I’m told on various forms of media, or just put my head down and not see that the light is coming?

But I also need to be looking in the right direction. As with the rising of the sun if I look a certain way then things look dark but I only need to turn my head sightly and look the other way and things are bright.

Which way will I look? Which way will you look? Which signs will I see? Which signs will you see?

It is all about choice. And Jesus does say about looking to the signs and being ready. [just go to www.biblegateway.com and search “signs”] Are we ready or are we caught in looking the wrong way?