Lights Out!

My cousin and I called the game “Dark.” The gist was Hide-and-Seek, but we played in the bathroom of our grandparents’ house because the room had no windows. Furthermore, once we stuffed a towel in the crack under the door, we were left in complete darkness. Hide-and-Seek is one thing…but Hide-and-Seek in the dark is quite another! We had to rely on our other senses to locate each other, like listening for breathing and reaching out with our hands to feel.

The other game we invented didn’t have a name, really. We only played this at night in our grandparents’ bedroom. One of us would turn off the light, and the other would toss glow-in-the-dark stickers (shaped like eyes – they must have been some sort of prize from the cereal box) in the air, scattering them across the floor. Then we would hunt for the stickers. The winner was the person who found the most stickers. Not that exciting, really, but at least we weren’t playing with a stick and some string.

I don’t know why we were so obsessed with the dark. John seemed a bit obsessed with darkness, too, when he wrote I John. The first two chapters discuss how God is light. When we claim to follow God but habitually walk in darkness, John says we lie to ourselves (I John 1:6). Earlier in the New Testament, John recorded Jesus as saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life” (John 8:12). Finally, as Christians, we are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14). It is our job to eradicate darkness.

As fond as I have been of playing in the dark, I do not wish to spend all eternity in the dark. Sometimes we try to switch off our Christian light so we can say or do something unbecoming our Christianity. Maybe next time we’ll think before we click off that light and consider what it really means to be in the darkness.