{The Sunlight Disappeared}

Fading, fading, blue jeans bleached.

Hair, one day, not brown but grey.

Why continue?

Everything just fades away. . .

 

I saw the sun shine brightly overhead.

I heard the sparrows chatter jabber over crumbs.

A cloud passed over the sun –

And life just sauntered on.

 

When the sunset set the sky afire,

We stood, our eyes were joy!

No consternation-

Incineration.

 

Vestiges, tattered remnants,

As lingering sparks disappeared,

Like guests at a masquerade ball,

Into the newborn night.

 

And at once fear dawned with the setting of the sun.

The blackness of night swallowed up the light.

Joy was gone.

Fear ran rampant; we could feel it brush against us

But we never saw it.

 

But fear’s origin is not in the night.

Fear began with the sun.

Fear is of the sun.

 

For without the sun,

none would fear the darkness.

But without the sun,

none would know true joy.

 

The sun is the cause of fear of the darkness. The Law’s existence spawned crime in the same way, as explained by the Apostle Paul:”What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ (Romans 7:7 NIV)

The fear of the darkness could be defined as the realization of helplessness and vulnerability without the sun. From this, hope is born; the hope for the sunrise.

Bad and Good are intertwined. If one didn’t exist, the other couldn’t be defined. Fear can produce Hope. Hope would not exist if life were completely Good. In this we see that Good can be the child of Evil. [And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him. . . Romans 8:28a]

We are stuck on a spinning sphere of darkness.  But the glimpses of the light we see are precious in the dark. We want more. We grow an overwhelming longing for the light that dominates our life. We want to be cynical, sneering at the naive, the joyful, in our own knowledge that there is no light, that Life is incredibly stupid and useless. But we can’t. We know the light must exist because we see fleeting instances of it. To deny that, would be to deny ourselves and our own senses. To deny that would be to deny the existence of the universe, concluding that only I exist and everything else is made through the intricacies of my deluded brain. Some go that far. At the end of that path is madness and death. The other path is the path that takes initiative to pursue the light. And so Hope is born. With the knowledge of light, the newborn Hope searches for more light, looking for fleeting glimpses of it with an eagle eye. The Hope analyzes those glimpses, turns them upside down, observes them, looks for patterns. The Hope grows and grows. It finds a pattern. It begins to narrow in on the connection between every glimpse of light. It begins to take on shape, solidifying from it’s initial state as an ethereal shimmer in the air. Hope has found the light from which all light originates. Hope morphs into Faith. Faith in the only source of light, in the one who IS light: Jesus Christ.

I asked in the first stanza of the poem, “Why continue?”

The answer is Jesus Christ.