We stepped outside, the warm light from the kitchen glowing behind us, nothing but darkness before us. The air carried an autumnal chill that stung our cheeks, filled our nose, and cut right through our exercise clothes. Silence permeated the landscape. I pulled out my phone, cued up the app that would play our morning prayers, and familiar, beautiful words spoke out into the darkness:

Lord, open my lips. And my mouth will proclaim your praise.
Come, let us worship the Lord…

My husband and I have been taking morning walks each day for over a year. We’ve been listening to morning prayers together for a couple months. But as our schedules demanded we move things earlier to be able to get out of the house on time, we decided to combine the two…and to do them both at 6 a.m., despite the fact that this time of year, that meant before daybreak. “Do we really want to walk in the dark?” we’d asked. And we answered, “Why not? Let’s give it a try. We can always bring a flashlight.”

It isn’t as though I’ve never taken a walk in the dark before, even in those last minutes before dawn. But there’s something about walking with prayers singing out around me that made me view it all in a different way. Or maybe in a very old way–certainly, none of my thoughts were new, either to me or to other people who have observed light and darkness and how the very physical versions remind us of so many Truths on a spiritual, mental, and emotional level.

Not new, but worth dwelling on again nevertheless.

The first day, we went out without a flashlight. Just to see, we said. Just to see if we could walk without it. The first side of our driveway we walked down, overhung with trees, was so dark in those first moments that my instinct was to reach out and grab my husband’s arm. Even though it isn’t exactly conducive to the brisk pace we always set, I wanted to lean in. To feel his presence. To know that though I couldn’t see him even a foot away in that darkness, he was there.

And I thought, How beautiful, Lord, to know that even when I can’t see You through the darkness, I know You’re there. Right there.

As we reached the bottom of our driveway and prepared for our first turn, usually executed with quickness and precision and knowledge, we both hesitated. Where was the bush that marked where we turn? The slope of the hill, the feel of the place said we were close, but where was it? Finally we turned; at that same place on the next day, when we had a flashlight in hand, we made the initial turn without the hesitation–but then I came to a halt, waiting for that beam of light to swing around. Because without it, I had no idea where my feet should land. I had no idea, having simply turned 180-degrees, where I was now.

And I thought, How lost I am when I turn from Your path, Lord, even a little. Even when I think I should know what I’m doing. Without Your Light guiding me, I can’t see a thing.

We traveled up that arm of the driveway again, under the thickest covering of trees. The prayers still sang out around us, filling my soul with the beauty of the Psalms, but I could see less even than before. I nearly tripped–as I often do even in the daylight–over that uneven spot where the driveway passes over some sort of culvert or pipe or something. But then–just then, when I stumbled a bit–I looked up. There, the trees end. There, starlight pierced the black sky with  bejeweled points of light that literally took my breath away. This is what Bram stayed up all night to behold in Worthy of Legend. This was the beauty he waited for daily.

And I thought, You positioned each star just so in the universe, Lord. Suns in those far-off solar systems, worlds unto themselves. Yet here they are, visible in my sky, showing up in lines and shapes, shining their glory to remind me of Yours. You call each star by name. You see it from every position, as we never can. We see only how each one looks, studded against our darkness. But You know the true measure of their light. We see only the beauty or the usefulness, but You created them with far more grandeur than what we can perceive.

On that side of our looping driveway, the neighbor’s house shines its own porch light out into the darkness. It spills out onto the drive, illuminating the general slope of the land, but not quite strong enough to show every rock or dip that could trip us up. Still, it’s helpful. When that light is at our back, illuminating our path, we can walk with confidence.

When You, Lord, are illuminating our path, we can walk with confidence.

But then at the bottom of that end of the driveway, we turn again. That porch light–so helpful a second ago–is now blinding. If we look up, we can see nothing but that globe of light. It makes the darkness around it seem darker, the things we could see a minute ago invisible in contrast to it.

Like when we look toward Your face, Lord. Your glory blinds us to all else. Your Light makes what had seemed bright-enough in the world suddenly cast in shadow. Beside You, nothing is visible unless You choose to illuminate it.

Then we pass by the house with its light, and we have to blink a few times. The darkness that had seemed navigable before now seems so dark.

When we’re in the world, we think we can see. We think we can navigate it with success. But looking at Your Light shows us how dark it really was and is. It makes us not want to enter that darkness again–certainly not without a Light of our own, shining a path.

How blessed we are, that He has called us out of darkness. How blessed we are, that He has called us into His marvelous light. And it makes me marvel. It does. Something as simple as a walk before daybreak can make it so clear–we are nothing without Him. We fumble about, we think we know where we’re going, we may even convince ourselves that the world is just as we like it. That it isn’t that dark. But the moment His Light touches that darkness, we see the truth.

The fifteen minutes of our morning prayer ended long before our walk. We got to watch the darkness lessen, degree by degree, lumen by lumen. Then a new beauty began to creep into view–the sun, warming the sky there between the mountains in the east. It started as a low blush of orange. Then it spread its fingers out, up and up and up into the sky, turning it from black to blue, to purple, to red, to orange, to yellow.

Dawn had come. Day had broken. Darkness was banished for another twelve hours. Light had found the world.

Thank you, Lord, not just for the sun we see each day, but for the Son that lights our eternity.

We reached the end of our walk, turned back into our warm, glowing kitchen. Our cheeks were cool, pink from autumn’s air. Our bodies were warm, invigorated from the 45-minute walk. Our spirits were renewed from the Scripture we’d just heard. Our minds were set from the conversation that followed.

And our hearts…our hearts were attuned to the Light of His coming. Today, tomorrow, forever. Each day and night a reminder of the glory of the God who reigns over the heavens.

Thank you, Lord, for Your Light.

Back in the days when I spent an hour of every weekday reading aloud to my kids for school, it was no great surprise to me which books from our reading list my kids loved best: the novels. We always had a novel going, and they were usually classic (often Newbury Award winning) historical fiction selections that tied in with what we were studying in history. But it wasn’t long before Rowyn (as a primary schooler) would start asking the same question with every book.

Is this true?

At the time, I would explain historical fiction to him–that the characters themselves were from the author’s imagination, but that they were interacting with true events or showing us a true glimpse of the world in which they were set. And Rowyn would always make a face and say something along the lines of, “But I want it to be true.”

These old memories, now nearing a decade old, came back to me the other week as David and I were talking about theology on one of our morning walks. What, we were asking, does it really mean to believe in something? It’s an interesting question when you dig down below the face of it. We believe in God. We believe in Jesus. Using the word belief there tells us that the very word gets at something important, some need planted deep within the heart of humanity. 

But we use the same word for other things. We ask if children believe in Santa Claus. We talk about whether we believe in ghosts. And as a novelist, I hear all the time whether my plots or characters or twists are believable.

Combining that thought with Rowyn’s question brought me to a rather odd but inescapable quirk of the human mind and heart: Our belief does not hinge on whether something is true…but on whether we want it to be. We can be “willing to believe” something not because  the evidence is irrefutable or the facts beyond dispute, but simply because we find the story compelling or convincing.

Then there’s the flipside–we can choose not to believe something because we don’t like it. We once sat in a Bible study in which there was a questionable version read of a verse. We had the Greek in front of us, so we could say, “Actually, that’s not accurate. It reads like this.” And someone replied, “Well, I just don’t believe that.”

I recall just blinking at her. Here was a woman who professed to be a Christian and “believed the Bible to be true,” but who was unwilling to believe a particular statement irrefutably from the Bible and upheld in the majority of translations through time (if not that one particular one) because it didn’t align with her worldview. And it wasn’t even one of those verses that you can take out of context or which was poetic. It was a concept expounded on over and again in the Epistles (to put others above yourself). How, I wondered, can you just say you don’t believe it and expect that to be an argument against it?

And yet…how often do we all do that? Reject something because we don’t like it? How often do we cling to something untrue because we do like it? How often do we think that our very belief or unbelief is all that it should take to convince the world to think like we do?

It’s a concept that we’ve been talking over a lot as we think about miracles through the history of the Church, of healings associated with things like relics, of the mysteries of faith. When we’re looking on those things from the outside, our questions tend to be, “Did that really happen? I don’t know if I can believe it.” But the “truth” of it isn’t really what we’re objecting to. There are Eucharistic miracles, for instance (when communion wafers have been turned into flesh), that have been scientifically examined and confirmed. But people will still dismiss it. Not because it isn’t true according to the definitio of factual–but because they can’t believe it. Why can’t they believe it?

Because if they believe it, they have to admit to other things too. They have to accept the whole of faith. They have to accept as Truth other things they’ve denied. You can’t believe in a miracle without granting the validity of the God, the Church, and the people who performed it.

The real beauty is the reverse though. When we surrender our wills and our logic to God, suddenly we can believe in things that seemed impossible, because we hold Him as the ultimate Truth. We can believe in the Red Sea parted. We can believe in the dead rising. We can believe in Peter’s shadow healing people. We can believe in the blind receiving sight, in storms being calmed, in angels battling for us in the heavenly spheres. We believe it not because it’s believable, but because when we put our hand in God’s, He gives us the grace to accept as Truth what defies logic. He gives us the grace to want to believe, and so, to do so. The cry of that desperate father–Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!–suddenly comes into clarity.

We’re all capable of believing in what isn’t true…but the real triumph of faith is being able to believe in what is.