The light comes and the darkness flees. Every day this happens, but shouldn’t it be explosive, uproarious, shocking? The darkness before Eloi’s light is so webbed and confusing, a heavy entity that tightens with struggle. Ravenna, the protagonist in this story, feels an unexlainable burden. Despair, ignorance, chains. Writing this story is changing me, whether I asked it to or not, viewing Ravenna’s transformation from inside her like this. When people ask me how I like writing, I tell them to be jealous and grateful it’s not them at the same time. Creating artistically pulls energy from places I didn’t know I had. I feel with her the darkness, the pitch black of night before God. Where can she turn? Wrapped in her hopelessness, until, in glorious day, she explodes into the morning. I want to scream about it, really. The light of Eloi is so warm, untangling, smoothing. You can see and know. You can be seen and be known. If you’ve let Jesus into your heart, God’s Spirit into yours, then you know this light. Don’t hide it away. Share it with others who still lurk in solitary confinement, unsure of the point of life. No matter how bright your first light is, it will fade if you put it in a closet and stuff rags under the doors.

     

     Good and evil, like light and dark, are sometimes more tangible than you would think. Glory is showing me that, one jarring page at a time. Not that it’s such a shocking story, but it has to be mine, and I find correlations between this story and the earthly one. I can see now that God has given us His glory and light to share. He is slowly cleansing our veins of the heavy darkness. Check yourself, as I do when I think of glory. Is His light shining through your heart, making it transparent, so that God can see every part?

     Take the light of God’s glory as your refuge, your rock, the thing you refuse to release. Persecution and pain cannot shake the fact that God is full of light, and we, as His followers, are like glowing embers, trying to start our own fire. There are fortresses of darkness in this world, and you need something to shield you while you walk there. Sometimes we’re not so far from fantasy.