I'm afraid of the dark

My mother knows that I get afraid sleeping at home alone at night. So when my husband went away for the weekend recently, she brought me a big brown teddy bear. The bear has become my favorite stuffed thing to sleep with because it fits perfectly in my arms. Every now and then when I snuggle into bed with a stuffed animal—a habit I didn’t pick up until college—I wonder again whether I’m just too old for this.

At the end of her visit to our house, my mother walked into every upstairs room, just peeking around to see what we’d done with the place. And I thought, “No room is scary now that she has been here and stepped inside them all, so bold, just as if the sun had not already set.” When it came time for her to leave, I walked her through the darkness to where her car sat, ready to sail away. I looked back toward our house, the bright light inside spilling out onto the porch. The house looked like a happy home of life, not scary at all. I suddenly wondered: Did I make it that way, or did my mother? If I went in now, would it feel as scary as it would have if she had never come?

Since my childhood, I have experienced a lively array of fears. As a little girl tucked in bed, I feared most storms and also the impossibly bright return of Jesus described in end times movies and books. I harbored especial terror for sounds that might herald robbers, and wakened my parents, who found nothing but the cat digging through the kitchen trash. Like big brown teddy bears, these kinds of fears are supposed to disappear when you grow up. But I have them still: strange sounds in the nighttime house, the cracking of the central air turning on, the mysterious dripping noises the refrigerator makes—all cause me to start and imagine the worst. At home alone, I quake in expectation that some unfamiliar shadow will disrupt the thin strip of light shining under my bedroom door.

All this fear, I hope, means in part that I have a good imagination. But the Bible has something to say about it too. “Take up the shield of faith,” says the Apostle Paul, “with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.”

I think about that, walking the creaky floors at night. Faith ponders the physiques of angels. It believes. As a preacher friend of mine says, “It refuses to not live in reality. In reality, God directs a holy host in the interest of my protection.”

Even my good imagination struggles to comprehend how safe I really am. I begin to wonder: Have these fears, my whole life long, been only the devil’s darts, setting my heart on fire with terrors? The terrors do all the damage without ever coming true. On the other hand, they drive me to God. I grow desperate, calling out to Him like the child I am.