Creative Writing: 2 Corinthians 4:6

We are not alone, and we are afraid.

It grows on you, like the prickly, anxious sensation you have when you feel that someone is watching you. This feeling, this fear, this certainty grows until it grips you. It is a sort of intuition that is felt deeply in the spirit, and while it may be suppressed, it cannot be gotten rid of.

From the time we are small, there is a sort of vague fear that flits about in the shadows of our rooms and hides in our closets and under our beds. It is the creeping sense that we are not alone. I wonder how many parents have come to a child’s rescue, to prove that there are no monsters in the closet, only to hesitate at the thresh-hold of darkness and silently be thankful for the light-switch at the door?

I believe that this feeling that all men experience is actually a flash of insight into the unknown that should be known. We busy ourselves to push it away as imagination. Only, the thing in the closet of our mind that silently waits is no monster; no, it is far worse and yet better. For the blessed, the door to the closeted soul cracks, and much to their surprise, it is not a thing of darkness that floods in but a thing of light. It is not the closet that is dark; it is the desolate room in which we live. And what emerges is not a hideous monster, but a Being too stunningly beautiful to be imagined in such a darkened mind.

With the light comes the horror, only more terrible than we could have imagined. This light allows sight, true sight, for the first time. Instead of a monster emerging from the closet, we find that the monster is us. The Being, we know with certainty, has come to destroy us, not because it is evil, but because we are. The magnificence of this One is so great that a single look upon His countenance will make all who view Him seem loathsome to themselves; as creatures fit only to be trod underfoot. This is the agony of who we are.

Yet, though it seems incredible, He did not come to destroy, not entirely. To call Him “Being” will no longer do, we know that now. Something has stirred within us, something that cries out for the One who has come, something that longs to go with Him beyond the door, something that wishes to flee the darkness, something that is more than what we were and desires to be more than we are. He put this there, and the glory of His presence is burning everything away that does not resound with this love and this new life.

This is what happens to a soul in which the day dawns and to which the light comes at last. The gospel brings the dawn, and the Lord Jesus is the sun, and yet the sun is too lowly and dim to compare to His brilliance. This thing happened to me, and is happening to me now. As I look to Him, the door cracks further, and I long to be away, away to the light, away from my darkness, and into a place where no monsters dwell.