Lord Jesus Christ, we implore You to hear our prayers and to lighten the darkness of our hearts by Your gracious visitation; for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Do you remember 12 years ago, right about this week in December? We were coming up to the winter solstice in the year 2012. There were some folks who were getting pretty worked up about the fact that a Mayan calendar stopped at that point. Did the Mayans think that the world would end on that day? Some thought so and got themselves into a lather about it. Did you wake up on the day after the solstice and breathe a sigh of relief? Or were you disappointed that the world was still chugging along?
We pray that the Lord Jesus would lighten our darkness by his visitation. I think too often we imagine that we can shed some light on the darkness of our lives. Don’t get me wrong, education, knowledge, technology, and eating right are all good things, but the light they shed is not the true light which we need. That light, which really lightens the darkness of our lives comes only from Christ. I have such a hard time discerning truth from fiction along with the rest of humanity. This pandemic has really revealed that to me. Whom can I believe anymore?
I heard a terrible story not long ago. A man brutally abused a woman, used her, and tortured her. It made me ashamed to be a human to hear that story of how one human mistreated another. As she was being interviewed, she said something truly remarkable. She said that her tormentor did not own her. He would certainly face a righteous judge in God, and that mean she could both release him and herself from the need to settle this score. She would pursue justice but did not take the responsibility for seeing that justice meted out to him. In this way he did not own her anymore, and she was free to live. She did not use the word “forgive.” I would not ask her to, but I could see that from the place where she was speaking in that interview, she might have said it. Jesus shines in the darkness.