God woke me up in the dark to speak this to me.

When you open your eyes in the dark, you can see shapes. The darkness makes sense to you. But if you turn on a light, everything you’ve known changes and brightens. Sometimes what you thought was one thing is revealed as another.

Turn the light off again and suddenly the darkness isn’t so familiar. It has lost its shape and now appears to be empty darkness. You can’t see anything, it doesn’t make sense to you… you feel a need to have the light back on.

If you ignore the need and let your eyes adjust for a few minutes, the darkness will once again take shape. It will start to fill with familiar things that comfort you. You can make sense of the darkness again.

Are you accustomed to the light or to the dark?

The same thing can happen in reverse.

If you’ve been inside a dark space for a long time and then step outside into bright sunlight, the light can blind you with its brightness and even feel harsh to your untrained eyes. There’s a part of you that recognizes the light as good and life-giving compared to the dark. But often instead of blinking and growing accustomed, like we do in the dark, we put on glasses, a hat- or you could call it a partial blindness- to protect ourselves from the light and make things feel more familiar. We block the light even as we stand in it.

My invitation to you is to resist the urge to block any part of the light and instead:

Live fully in the light.

Get uncomfortable so that your eyes can grow fully accustomed to it. Take off the partial blindness and step away from the light switches or the caves.

It is important that we live fully in the light and become light so that we can answer God’s call when he tells us to “Go” (Matthew 28:19), back into the darkness of our world. The darkness is where we find the lost and partake in God’s mission to restore the world. But you are meant to be LIGHT in the darkness! (Matthew 5:14-16) The darkness is not meant to touch you! You are made to change the darkness into light. If you have lost your light, grown dim, and started to become like darkness, you need the Son. Remind yourself what light is, who you are. And let that lesson of oneness sink in before you go back.

The secret of never growing dim is to never separate the two, you and the Son. You can keep coming back and getting relit or you can take the Son with you, everywhere you go, let him dwell in you and you in Him; shine the way He does and see what His light can do.

 This is the life-giving message we heard him share and it’s still ringing in our ears. We now repeat his words to you: God is pure light. You will never find even a trace of darkness in him.

If we claim that we share life with him, but keep walking in the realm of darkness, we’re fooling ourselves and not living the truth. But if we keep living in the pure light that surrounds him, we share unbroken fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, continually cleanses us from all sin. (1 John 1:5-7, TPT)