When December Feels Too Dark

Devotional

The days keep getting shorter.

You can feel it in the afternoon light that quits on you before you're ready. In mornings that never really brighten. In the way something settles over the whole house when evening comes at four-thirty.

December is heavy for some of us. Not everybody. But some.

And if you're one of them, you know the darkness isn't only outside the window.

It's in your chest. It's a fog over your thinking. It's a quiet dread that a season built for joy is somehow making the ache worse.

The Bible does not flinch from darkness. It never pretends the world is brighter than it is.

When Isaiah talks about people walking in darkness, that wasn't a poetic flourish his readers had to decode.

That was their life. Exile. Occupation. The long silence of God stretching across whole generations.

These were people who knew what it was to sit in the shadow of death and wonder each morning if the light was ever coming back.

And into that, God speaks.

"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone."

Now look at the verb tense.

Have seen. Has shone.

Not might. Not will, if things go well.

The prophetic word declares what God is going to do with such certainty that it gets spoken like it already happened.

To a people sitting in the dark, that kind of certainty isn't a platitude. It's oxygen.

But here's what we can't miss.

The light Isaiah promises isn't a general brightness. It's not a mood lifting or a season turning.

It's a person.

And the joy he describes is the joy of deliverance. The joy of people rescued by somebody stronger than whatever had them.

That's not the comfort of a nice thought. That's the celebration after a completed victory.

John picks up the thread and takes it all the way:

"In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Read that last clause slow.

The darkness has not overcome it.

Not "has not yet." Not "probably won't."

Has not. Cannot. Will not.

The light that came into this world in Christ is not a candle hoping to survive till morning.

It's the life of God himself, shining in a dark that has no power to put it out.

So when your December is too dark, that's the truth your soul needs.

Not that things will get easier. Not that you need to think more positively about it.

That into the thickest dark, God sent a light that cannot be extinguished.

Isaiah says it again, and I love the contrast in it:

"Arise, shine, for your light has come... For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you."

Do you see both halves?

Darkness will cover the earth. Thick darkness over the peoples. Isaiah is not denying any of that.

But over against it he sets something bigger. The LORD will arise.

The darkness is real. It just isn't ultimate.

And the light that overcomes it isn't your optimism or your effort or your ability to get it together by Christmas morning.

It's his glory, risen on you.

Zechariah saw it too. When his son was born, he prophesied past John to the Christ who was coming:

"Because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death."

The sunrise doesn't come because we earned it.

It comes because of the tender mercy of our God.

It visits. It shines. It guides. Every one of those verbs belongs to God, not to you.

So here's the gospel for your darkest December.

You don't have to generate your own light. And you don't have to pretend the dark isn't there.

The dark is real. Your grief is real. Your exhaustion is real.

The light shining in it is more real still.

Christ came into the exact place where you're sitting, and his coming is not threatened by how deep your night goes.

And notice how the psalm puts it: "Light dawns in the darkness for the upright."

Dawns. Not bursts.

Dawn doesn't announce itself. It comes gradually, and you almost miss it until you look up and the room has changed.

That might be how his light reaches you this year.

Not a blinding moment. The slow dawning of his presence in a Bible you opened when you didn't feel like it. In a prayer that felt thin while you prayed it. In a room full of God's people where your darkness got met by somebody else's small light.

So you don't have to outrun this.

The one who is the light of the world walked into the darkest night this world has ever seen.

And he walked out the other side.

He is risen. And because he is risen, no December, no grief, no depression, no spiritual winter gets the final word.

The light shines in the darkness.

And the darkness has not overcome it.

It never will.