Darkness Yields Destiny

Darkness Yields Destiny

Contemporarily, most pictures are taken with a smart phone.  One carrier claims bragging rights to selling the phone with which the average citizen takes the most personal and family photos.  In an instant, anyone records a moment of personal history.  In even less time, he shares that photo with the rest of the world via a social network. Heretofore, new parents took pictures with an actual camera; developed negatives; made multiple copies; and mailed them to anxiously waiting grandparents.  The use of disposable camera was the state-of-art in the last years of the twentieth century.  Prior to express photo developing which most chain drug and grocery stores offered inexpensively, consumers relied upon professional photographers who took pictures with old fashioned cameras and developed the negatives in a dark room.

Professional photographers developed pictures using a painstaking process in a dark room.  It was most important that no light enter the room.  Synthetic and sunlight completely ruined; photos were forever lost.  Interestingly, the darkness enables the pictures to come into focus.  Applied spiritually, the lesson of the dark room teaches us to embrace bleak, adversarial and challenging periods in life.  Deep darkness and difficult days crystallize our priorities.  They encourage us to use our time, talents, treasure and resources as efficiently and effectively as possible.  Darkness yields destiny.  Should you be in a hard season of life, embrace any lessons it yields.  These trying days will define your destiny.

It is ironic to parallel disease, divorce, debt, depression and death with brilliant nighttime stars.  These unfortunate experiences offer personal and existential illumination.  Like the North Star, they serve as guiding lights helping travelers to stay on course and arrive safely to their destination.  Dreadful diagnoses motivate us to practice good stewardship of physical health.  Wide dissemination of public health information regarding diet, exercise, sleep patterns and other disease prevention strategies rarely changes the average person’s health practices.  The pit of sitting with a potentially life threatening illness clarifies the necessity of developing good health habits.  Possibly the surest instance of unrequited love, divorce awakens its victims to the colossal waste of their personalities, emotions and commitment in unfulfilling relationships.  Excessive debt reflects poor financial stewardship, lack of self-discipline, inability to delay gratification and other character defects.  It is difficult to overestimate the debilitating and paralyzing potential of depression in a sufferer’s daily life.  If properly treated professionally and medically, depression can become the catalyst to a brand new life.  The energy and creative potential of internal anger can be directed outward toward the sufferer’s purpose and passion.  Lastly, the death of a loved one or close friend often reminds us to live happily, joyously and freely.  The shock of a sudden, unexpected, and fatal heart attack of a relative who was a contemporary in age coerced me to stop and give thanks for life itself.  It further forces me to consider two maxims.  Marianne Williamson posits, “If you think you are wasting your life, chances are you are correct.”  Thomas Carlyle submits, “Nothing is more worthless than activity without insight.”  Those quotes motivate me to examine my use of time, life’s most precious commodity.  The darkness of death often crystallizes the worth of time.  It helps a person to define his or her destiny.

Darkness often coincides with defining moments.  We rarely examine our lives when everything is going well.  Assuredly, we need beautiful, picture perfect summer days when we enjoy simply being alive.  However, it is the winter of discontent that we usually define destiny.  Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding pastor of Riverside Church, credits a debilitating nervous breakdown as the catalyst that secured many years of successful and effective preaching.  His personal difficulty enabled him to empathize more greatly with other people’s incapacities.  The bleakest experience of his life defined his destiny as a clergyperson, preacher and pastor.  Wrought with recurring injuries to her legs and back, tennis superstar, Venus Williams, began to look beyond her personal dreams and achievements.  During a recuperative period, she pondered the inequity of compensation between men and women on the professional tennis tour.  Her time away from the sport enabled her to advocate successfully for justice and equity in pay.  Beyond the quintessentially American rags-to-riches story of Venus Williams beginning her career on the warped courts of Compton California to becoming a multiple winning Grand Slam champion, perhaps her destiny in the sport was pay equity and mutual respect for women.  The late Eartha Kitt, sonorous alto jazz, soul and blues singer, was abandoned by her mother as an infant.  That deep and indelible wound in her heart and soul never healed during her life.  Yet, the most favorable responses of audiences throughout the world after her performances supplied tremendous compassion.  When Kitt realized that her music could propel people to show adoration and affection that always moved her to tears, she dedicated herself to giving each audience the performance of a lifetime.  Again, her darkness as lived through the prism of abandonment motivated Kitt to become an award winning singer and entertainer.

Spiritually speaking, darkness offers clarity about your primary purpose?  Personal tragedy and natural disasters are the best teachers.  They cultivate discipline to direct energy and abilities toward worthwhile causes.  Mostly, periods of darkness open the door to new mysteries and miracles that God orchestrates.