Walking in Darkness

For almost 18 years we lived in the same house in rural New Mexico, ten miles outside of Roswell.  There are earlier pictures of us in another house nearby, but I had no memory of that.  All I could remember was our house in the country.

It came as quite a shock to me when my dad decided to take a job in Las Cruces, NM just after I graduated from high school in 1972.  I grew up with tendencies toward brooding, anyway, and those two major changes sent me into a mild depression.

Our small home, surrounded by an acre of beautiful green grass, sat on ten acres of barren pastureland.  As children, we created a bike trail around the pasture, and wore deep tracks in it throughout the year.  

During my high school years, I didn’t use it much.  I was too involved in school and extracurricular activities.  Wayne and Marsha had already graduated high school, and gone off to college or married.  The trail was unused, and clumps of weeds and grass began to grow up along the once well-worn path.

I have always loved to walk and think, and so that year I rediscovered this little path.  Every night I would lose myself in the desolate darkness of our little New Mexican pasture.  Nothing would illumine the path unless the moon was out.

One dark, cloudy night in May, I went for my usual walk.  I worried about so many things that were of such great consequence back then.  Losing friends, finding a job, starting college, changing churches, making new friends, dating.  I wasn’t paying much attention to where my feet were going, and could not have seen the fresh, little clump of grass, anyway, because of the darkness.  In the blink of an eye, I was on my face, and trying to catch the breath that was knocked out of me.  I got up, dusted myself off, and walked on a little more carefully.

Solomon said, “The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.  But the way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble.”

It’s really not very smart to walk along a path at night without any light.  There is no way to know what dangers might lie in the path; you simply can’t see them.  But there are people we know who choose to live their entire lives in darkness!  These are the people who are always asking the “why me” question.

“Why is this happening to me?”

“Why do I always fail in every relationship, job, opportunity?”

“Why is everyone out to get me?” “Why me?”

You may not be asking all of those questions, but you’ve experienced them at some point in your life, or you’re experiencing one or more right now.  Why do you continue to walk in the darkness?  Why not come into the light?  You may still stumble, but at least you’ll know what it was you stumbled over, and you can do something about it.

Still today, I like to walk, think, and pray.  But I walk in the morning now.  Somehow I think the early light of dawn is so much better than deep darkness.