Afraid of the Dark

I grew up pretty much perpetually afraid of the dark. I was a lights-on, head-covered, prayer-saying, kind of kid. On those rare occasions when my head was not under the blanket or under my pillow, I would be entranced by the lights from the passing cars outside my window as they slid down the wall, casting shadows into the corners of the room and highlighting the closet door I forgot to close.

There were carnivorous animals of every stripe under my bed. Don’t ask me how I knew that; I just did. And I had devised elaborate rules for what those animals were allowed to do to get me. Mostly, any time my feet touched the floor I was fair game. This meant, among other things, that whenever I had to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, I had to stand up on the bed and jump as far as I could so I could land on the floor out of reach of claws and teeth. Of course, on the return trip I had to get a running start and leap into the bed from the middle of the room.

The most afraid I ever was as a child might be the time I woke up early in the morning to find a tiger in bed with me. It was still dark outside, which meant that I couldn’t see much in my room. Not that I would have tried to move my head to look. The tiger was curled up behind me, heavy and ominous, and I could hear its guttural breathing and feel its hot, fetid, breath on my neck (I didn’t know it was fetid at the time, of course—I was only 6!). I’m not sure how long I lay there frozen with fear, but I do know I spent most of the time berating fate or whomever was responsible for this inexcusable violation of clearly established boundaries. The creatures of the night were no allowed to get into the bed; that was my safe space! As frightened as I was, I was just that relieved once the sun came up and I dared to look behind me, only to find the bed invader was our German Shepherd, Tippy.

This thought occurred to me the other day: as I grew older my fears sort of reversed themselves. Whereas as a child I feared the dark, as I grew older, I began to prefer the darkness to the light. The light made me uncomfortable because it allowed me to see too much, the same way the dark used to bother me because I couldn’t see as clearly as I wanted to. Mostly what I didn’t want to see in the light was myself. The light was far too revealing, and I would often seek out the darkness just to hide myself.

I was that person Jesus described to Nicodemus the night they met in secret; I was the man who loved the darkness more than the light because the light was too revealing (John 3:19). But then I am also now that man who has the light of life because I follow the Light of the World (John 8:12). I’m no longer fearful of the dark, but neither do I crave its cloaking properties. I’m one of those dark-walking people who “have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2). I didn’t flip on the light switch, but the light is shining just the same. The only way to avoid the beauty of the light is to refuse it by closing my eyes. Some do that, you know, but I want to see. I’ve kind of reverted in a way to my childhood—I want to keep the light on all the time. How about you?