Without the Darkness We Can’t Have a Dawn

The saying goes that it’s always darkest before it dawns. Another way of looking at that is that there can’t be a dawn if it isn’t first dark. This incredibly profound insight came to me after watching some of my kids’ movies over the Christmas break. Classics like Cars, Shark Tales, and Finding Nemo – even the animated version of Ben Hur to round off the list. In each of these stories, and countless others, things are seemingly going well (I’d say swimmingly but that’s a little over the top this early on). Everybody’s pretty much doing their thing when they get sucked up into a plot. Something bad happens that rocks their world and things go from good to horrible. While I’d hate to spoil the endings for you in the above mentioned movies, in the end things end up fantastic, far better than they ever would have been had the horrible event not occurred.
A brief look into other events shows that this plot development doesn’t occur in just movies. As horrible as Word War II really was, church historians credit it for the initiating the largest modern movement in worldwide missions. Going back a couple thousand years, the persecution and scattering of the early church facilitated the spread of the gospel. Let’s go back a few more thousand years to man’s beginning. Assuming that, like me, you believe there was an Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden, you’d also have to say that they had it pretty good. Everything was going well. They even walked with God at points during the day. Then came that horrible plot twist: sin. That was a pretty dark moment for us. Yet out of that development came redemption through Christ and the opportunity to be “seated in the heavenly places with Christ” (present tense) and “joint heirs with Christ.” Adam & Eve were not initially offered that ending. There’s a lot of plot development that I’m skipping over here for sake of brevity, but we definitely went from good, to horrific, to great beyond belief.
When watching my son watch the above movies, he often covers his ears during those tense parts. It’s kind of cute, but I personally don’t like watching the tense parts of certain movies; I’d rather just skip to the ending that I know will be happy. How true that is of my own life as well. I don’t like the tense, dark, scary, unknown parts of my life. I want to fast forward, look away, or do something else during parts of my life’s plot. However, I know that my story has a happy ending. (Rom. 8:28). I just don’t know when.
I should embrace the dark, uncomfortable parts of my life because they are what ultimately makes the story worth the telling. Without them we can’t really see just how great the finish really is. Were they not around, I would never be able to appreciate the dawn that follows.