DECEMBER 6TH | TO BEHOLD THE SUN
Photo: K. Dagen
The rain runs down my arms. Chains of an imprisoning chill. The sky is stone-gray, the water like melted winter against my body. Climbing out of the river, I shiver. There’s little misery as maddening as cold plus wet, with no way to change it.
I came to study survival. It has become a study of the soul. The cold invites quitting, the demands on the body offer discouragement. I sink onto a patch of damp sand, tired and touched with all the weight that is being a body in a creation that cries out: cries out for peace, restoration, redemption.
Do you ever feel that crying out? That ache for all we’ve never known, but know we miss, just the same?
Does your stretch of this life’s river ever chill you straight through, and leave you stranded on the bank wondering if you’ll ever wrap up in warmth again?
It’s weighty, this waiting. The whole world has been waiting for thousands of years, yearning for the Prince of Peace. We’re waiting. Waiting for the day the dawn arrives and delivers us from the darkness that is curse-laden living.
Sometimes, all the light seems scoured from the sky and hidden beneath the silent horizon. And I wonder, will it always be this way?
As I sit in the sand scratching scars and hunkering down hard into my hope-stripped heart, I feel it—the rain is stopping. Almost simultaneously I see it, this subtle shift in the light. My shoe soaked through is suddenly surrounded by a spreading patch of bright, and the silt begins to sparkle.
The light has come back.
I feel it first on my arms and the back of my neck, and it’s like a blanket, baked warm in the dryer, just settled on my shoulders. I have never felt a relief like this, never known the tension to melt away like this. I shut my eyes and tilt my face up to the sun. And I rejoice.
“Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun,” Solomon said.
Sweeter still the coming of the Light of the World, and the day my eyes behold the Son.
Is this what the expectation answered will feel like? This flooding of warmth and hope and life itself?
Is this how creation’s redemption will be received? With a joy unbounded and a sense of finding the edges of the place you know you fit into?
Is this how the second Advent will fill me up? With the heat and the light I’ve long craved coming in and emptying me, all the coldness clearing out and away, creating a capacity for passion to kindle?
The light this day cuts through the wet, and I remember: light’s arrival is worth the wait.
“Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
The cold always comes to an end, the wait will end in warmth.
Hallelujah, and hope on.