Spending a day in the Light

“But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible” (Ephesians 5:13).

I had a fantasy for Mother’s Day and the Lord graciously made it come true. I wished to play baseball with my children and my father, along with a sufficient number of friends to serve as fielders. And I wished to be perfectly happy, and for hurts and sins never to be brought to mind.

A few things had to fall into place to make the dream happen. One was that I had to find a park with picnic tables and a baseball diamond. (On Wednesday I had visited a church elder and happened to notice a site near his house that met my requirements.) Then the venue had to be available and not already taken by some other group with the same idea.

Then the weather had to be not too cold (to accommodate my poor blood circulation) and not too hot or humid (who wants to run bases in that?): The Lord provided abundant sun, clouds like sailing ships, and 70 degrees. The park had to be close enough to home for my mother to consent to come out: It was. I had to scare up bats, balls, and gloves: My son obliged. One problem was the lack of a grill on the premises: A friend pulled up with a truck and unloaded his deluxe home propane grill.

After more than a month thinking about abortion and the Kermit Gosnell trial, I spent an entire afternoon of complete amnesia from it. My mind was filled with things that pertain to Light and not to Darkness: fresh air, green grass, love, peace, and the crack of a bat. When you are immersed in the world of baby dissectors for a long period of time, your eyes become accustomed to the darkness and dankness of the room, and you begin to see some things as darker or lighter than others. You find yourself joining into the making of minute legal and moral distinctions, elevating those who kill inside the womb above those who kill outside and those who kill at 24 weeks above those who kill at 25. The Blackness seems to have 50 shades of gray, with some shades more acceptable than others.

But when you have been out of the pit of hell for a day and walked in a purer light, you see all of hell as hell, with no differentiations. The contrast to Light is so jarring when you suddenly are plunged back into Darkness that it is the commonalities of the darkness that impress you, rather than the picayune differences.

Jesus went up on a mountain with three friends to spend a day in sheer Transfigurating light, where the conversation with Moses and Elijah was all clean and pure conversation, free of lies and corruption. Afterward, the band came down from the mountain and they were immediately plunged into a scene of scribes and apostles arguing over theology, and an epileptic boy unable to be healed for lack of serious praying. The spectacle was so jarring to those who had come out of the mountaintop light that I daresay there was no thought in the minds of Jesus, Peter, James, and John of one kind of darkness being preferable to another.

At the end of the day there are only two kingdoms: the kingdom of Light and the kingdom of Darkness. And all things, however many there are, fall into only one of the two.