Category: Darkness and Light

Light in the Darkness by Liz Carter part 2

On By auntyamoIn Darkness and Light, Guest Posts, Health, weight & wellbeing, Poetry, Writing, Blogging etcLeave a comment

It’s great to have Liz Carter back today. If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, you really should. Liz’s honesty and openness is such a blessing. Here she is with the second part of her post on Light and Dark.

It’s good to be back 🙂 I finished yesterday, by saying, the more I dig into Scripture, the more I find the most starkly honest writings there poured out for all to see, overflowings of emotion and anger and sorrow spilling onto the pages – most of the prophetic writings are like this and the Psalms are full of songs of lament as much as songs of praise.

It seems to me that we are on dangerous ground if we insist that we must keep our own darkness hidden in the darkness, because that is not the biblical model.

Biblical writers craft their words with honesty and authenticity. They tell it how it is. They do not tell us that there will be no suffering in the Christian life, nor do they tell us that the Christian life will be blessed with health and wealth and no pain. In fact, if anything, they tell us the opposite. Paul tells us that he lived in hardship and persecution, suffering for Christ and with Christ – and his words are full of the profound mystery of the intersection of brokenness and the peace of God that passes all understanding. The Psalmists wrote of isolation and imprisonment, of sickness and danger. And in the centre of it all we have Jesus, a man of sorrows who knew the great depths of suffering like no other.

I always think it would be so hard to follow a faith where the deity remains outside of our understanding and experience. Christianity is unprecedented among faiths in that God became one of us and sunk into our pain and mess with us. The incarnation points to the beautiful and complex intricacies of the fingerprints of God amongst us; a God willing to lay aside all his majesty and fall into the dust, to suffer and die, to take all our pain and sin and mess upon his body. It is a mystery that cannot be contained in words, but a mystery bursting at the seams with hope and life, and one that speaks loud into our own agonies like nothing else.

And this, ultimately, is what lights our path ahead; the knowledge that God is not far away, but is with us by his Spirit and in his experience of broken humanity. On days I have nothing left I can only look back to God, as the Psalmists so often did in their wretched poems of sadness and yearning. I can still choose to ‘yet praise’ within the days of trouble.

This winter will be long and bleak, and bleaker still for some of us, for many reasons. But winter ends in a glorious awakening, and God reminds us of that in a love song:

‘See, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone.’ (Song of Songs 2:10)

One of my poems from my new book incorporates this theme, and so I would like to share a few words from this poem with you today, with the prayer that God will speak to the deep places in you and flood you with a hope wider, deeper, longer and higher than you could ever imagine:

Oh hasten the day
when death flees away
when the winter of mourning
melts to joy in the morning,
when bleak shadows are drenched
in the glory of your dazzling light,
when darkest places and worn-down wastes
are crushed in the power of outrageous grace
The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone,
find love that is deep and love that is long
find immersive light and ageless depths
find crazy love in inexorable breadth
Oh hasten the day
when night flees away.

Treasure in Dark Places is a collection of poetry and short stories which are re-imaginings of biblical accounts and encounters with Jesus that take the reader into the heart of the stories, where you yourself can experience and encounter the God who loves you, and where you will find resonance and comfort in your own struggle.

Click here to see the trailer video

Liz Carter is a writer and poet from Shropshire who likes to write about finding gold in the mess of life. She is the author of Catching Contentment: How to be Holy Satisfied (IVP) and her new book, Treasure in Dark Places: Stories and poems of hope in the hurting, is out now.

Light in the Darkness by Liz Carter part 1

On By auntyamoIn Darkness and Light, Guest Posts, Health, weight & wellbeing, Poetry, Writing, Blogging etc1 Comment

Continuing the theme of Light and Dark, I am delighted to welcome Liz Carter to the blog. She will be sharing today and tomorrow, and we’ll hear about her new book, Treasure in Dark Places: Stories and poems of hope in the hurting.

So, over to Liz…

With the clocks going back and the winter drawing in, many of us are living with a creeping sense of dread that coils around us like the fog on a chilly winter day. As the days grow colder and the nights darker, we often feel enveloped in gloom, and now more than ever, as we wonder when all this will come to an end. Winter seems to stretch ahead with no promise of hope, with no sparkles of joy to look towards and wait for with anticipation. Winter 2020 seems like a pit of nothingness, a black hole of rubbishness and sadness.

Perhaps, for some of you, it’s not just 2020 that feels that way to you. Perhaps you’ve lived through years where the nights are too dark and the air too frozen around you. Maybe you’ve been living with sickness, physically or mentally, or living with grief, or other burdens which have left you bruised and battered, unsure where to look for any signs of hope.

For me, this year has been tough, but my whole life has been lived in pain, to some degree, with a chronic lung condition from infancy. This year I went into shielding in March after receiving the letter that punched me in the gut with its words instilling more fear in me: I’d been identified, it told me, as someone with risk of severe illness if I caught Covid-19. I separated out from my family and lived in my room for almost five months, caged into a life without touch or the usual family interaction. It was tough. It sent me spiralling mentally, into restless, tearful nights and days that seemed to stretch too long at times.

But God kept sending me little reminders of his presence and his love. As I began to let go of some of my fear and pour out some of my restlessness into poetry and other forms of writing, God spoke peace into my heart, and even sparks of joy at times.

God reminded me that it is sometimes in the darkest places where we find unexpected treasure, where light is able to break through in even more splendour, puncturing the blackness and calling us on towards the hope we find in Jesus.

I wonder if you have ever felt that you should be happy at all times as a Christian. Perhaps you’ve even heard teaching encouraging you to claim prosperity and health in all areas of your life, that because God is a generous God he will give you these – you only need to ask. Perhaps you’ve felt unable to share honestly about tough times, because you have been led to feel that you are, in some way, failing God because of your struggle. You hear the great triumphant stories of healing and wholeness, of God coming through for people when they are suffering, of God’s great and miraculous provision. But when it doesn’t seem to happen like that in your life, you can be left sad and alone, hugging your suffering to yourself in the mistaken idea that you cannot share it with others, because it might put them off the idea of faith.

Yet the more I dig into Scripture, the more I find the most starkly honest writings there poured out for all to see, overflowings of emotion and anger and sorrow spilling onto the pages – most of the prophetic writings are like this and the Psalms are full of songs of lament as much as songs of praise. Tomorrow I will write more about that and share one of the poems from my book

Thank you Liz. It’s a blessing to read such refreshing honesty in difficult times.

I look forward to hearing more. In the mean time, Liz’s book Treasure in Dark Places: Stories and poems of hope in the hurting can be found here. Until tomorrow… A x

More on light and dark

On By auntyamoIn Darkness and Light1 Comment

So many people love this time of year. Autumn colours, pumpkin spice lattes, snuggly scarves, warm fires, falling leaves etc. It’s not my favourite season. I prefer Spring. The hope of good weather and the promise of longer days and brighter evenings. The only thing I love about this time of year is that I can get all my hats out and start wearing them again. I have quite a few. In fact those of you who have been following this blog for a long time will remember it was originally called, Just Another Christian Woman… talking through her hat.

As a kid, I hated the dark. My bedroom door had a glass panel above it and when the landing light was on I got the benefit of it. But it was always turned off when the last person went to bed. I often felt vulnerable once the light was off.

If everyone was asleep, who would hear if someone broke in? A fear of my home being broken into stayed with me for years; even now I don’t like to stay on my own overnight.

In my teenage years dark evenings meant I had to be in. I wasn’t allowed out after dark until I was 16 or so. Even then I had to fight for it. Until that great liberation, in the winter months, I’d run home from school, change out of my uniform and meet my friend. We’d do a quick lap of Tallaght, stopping off in the Town Centre to look at the make-up stall or visit the record shop, then run home to be in before the dusk curfew. When we were finally allowed out after dark, it turned out it was too cold to be hanging around the streets, (unless the was a boy to meet), so we’d end up in her kitchen or mine.

Sounds like a bit of a contradiction doesn’t it? I didn’t want the dark as a small child, but was eager to be out and about on a dark evening when I was a teenager. On reflection, I think darkness was ok, as long as was with my friend. I didn’t want to be out in the dark on my own. It’s darkness when I’m alone that gave/gives me problems.

1 John 1:5 says “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” If John had been Irish, he might have said, “there’s no darkness at all, at all.” No darkness what so ever. The closer we get to him, the less darkness there is. In a time of social distancing, it is such a comfort to remember that God is not distant. He is always with us. Not two millimetres away, never mind two metres.

Two things come from this for me.
1. I am never alone, God is always with me
2. If he is with me, there is no darkness at all (at all) 🙂

Thanks so much for all your encouraging comments and messages about my last post. I really appreciate it. It’s great to be back writing again after a long dry spell.

A x

photo credits 1. Mattiii photo The Long Shadow via photopin (license) 2. Annmarie Miles