Dwelling With Darkness

Made Flesh

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”

This line gets quoted often, usually quickly and with confidence. As if darkness is a problem to be solved, and light is here to win.

Admittedly, when I read this passage, I have to fight my initial instinct to villainize darkness. Throughout much of my Christian walk, “light equals good, dark equals bad” was a default moral framework. This binary was reinforced for me through preaching, art, everyday language, and colonial theology.

So when I read, “The light shines in the darkness,” my mind wants to subconsciously fill in the rest: darkness is sin, evil, and ignorance. Darkness is something to escape or defeat. Light is purity, truth, and righteousness. Light is the goal.

But the longer I live and work from below, the harder that reading is to sustain. John tells us that the light shines in the darkness – not after the darkness clears, or once clarity comes and questions are answered. Light shines in the darkness.

This matters to me because I don’t work in spaces that are easily illuminated, or where darkness disappears. Yesterday, I got a call from a single mother I work with. She made it to the United States in 2022, after a long and difficult journey from Venezuela, with the hope of something better for her and her daughter. In the call, she let me know that she is set to see an immigration judge in just a few short weeks. In this court appearance, it will be determined whether she can stay in the United States, or if she will be forced to return to a place she doesn’t deem safe. She is scared, confused, and trying to make sense of God’s plan for her and her daughter. Her story isn’t one that has a quick resolution. Darkness, for her, isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t disappear, and the trauma she’s holding doesn’t close neatly. Darkness, for her, is the setting in which work is being done.

John doesn’t say that the darkness is evil, or that we should fear it. He simply names it as part of the beginning, and acknowledges that it exists alongside the Word. This reframes everything for me! With it, I can move forward, experiencing darkness as the absence of certainty, rather than the absence of God. It is in this place that I – that we – can learn to be alert, adaptive, and resilient. The Word doesn’t shame that. The Word becomes flesh, entering a world that has been shaped by shadow, and takes on the same vulnerabilities as me and the people I get to walk alongside.

The Incarnation is not God bringing clear-cut answers; it is God bringing presence – and what a gift that is!

This changes the way I approach my own work with families facing displacement. My job isn’t to bring light in a way that overwhelms their eyes. Rather, I am called to sit long enough for vision to adjust, and to trust that accompaniment itself is a form of illumination. My job is to honor the darkness, the lessons learned while we’re inside of it, and the relationships that are fostered through it – not to explain it away in a way that feels rushed or forceful.

Grace upon grace doesn’t show up all at once. It is a slow and layered companionship offered to us by God. The Word shines, yes – but the Word also stays and waits and dwells. And for those of us who live and work from below, that’s the good news we can trust.

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Dwelling Among Us 

What wisdom have you gained while sitting in darkness?

How might the lessons learned in darkness be honored rather than rushed past or explained away?