When the Light Goes Out of Your Life

A gloomy darkness threatened to settle into my life in the last few weeks. God had been so very good to shed so much mercy on my pathway through cancer besides so many other goodnesses and mercies.

And then other heartaches came. 

I remembered when Jonathan's mother passed away, the words his dad wept in a moment of deepest grief, "The light has gone out of my life."

And what could we say to comfort him?
There are times when there are no words.

An arm around a shoulder, a silent sympathy, a wordless prayer sent heavenward is all that we could do--and yet such a prayer is answered.

Light came again into Daddy Lucas's life when Ruth Runnells and he discovered that they were enjoying each other's companionship in the aftermath of loss for each of them. They have been married well over two years now, even though Daddy Lucas was already 86 when they married.

But there are losses far greater and far more extensive and far more heartbreaking.

What do you do when the light goes out of one's life?

The sun that was my light by day

Has set. The moon has dimmed its glow.

The candle in my room is snuffed,

The last small star is gone also.

The grief, the loss, the pain, the night,

The darkness I can feel.

Where are You, God, when sun has set

On wounds that cannot heal?

I cannot count the hours of night

Before a taunting dawn.

I cannot sleep in night this dark

With all the starlight gone.

But down the long, dark hall of fear

I see a sudden glow.

Is it a candle or a lamp?

A window for my soul?

The radiance brightens as I move

On through the tunnel of despair.

I don't deserve the sense of Love

That beckons me with "I am there."

And suddenly I'm in the light

So bright my eyes must close.

I shield my gaze and bow my head.

I'm warmed from head to toes.

The Lord has come, His Love the Sun

That's bursting through the night.

The Lord, the everlasting God--

He is my dawn, my light!

--Anna Lucas