“Doesn’t the sky look so close?”
Little Brother said this from the backseat on the way to school two mornings ago, the last time it didn’t rain. We weren’t used to seeing the sun–La Niña has made sure of that for weeks now–and his interpretation of that development was a super-close sky. I often notice how The Kid sees light differently, how neurodivergence opens his eyes to other beams, but on this morning LB let me into his particular brand of light-gazing.
We set our clocks back an hour over the weekend, and that’s changed the light too: earlier sunsets ending our daylight hours sooner. Light falling in different patterns at different times as winter here approaches. It’s both disorienting and illuminating.
Tuesday, the day the sun was close, I headed to my harbour beach for the first time in about two months for an ocean swim, the water murky all around me, the rising sun’s shafts barely breaking the surface. I had to raise my head, look up rather than down, to see where I was going.
There is less light, all around us. But it isn’t gone. What remains stands out. It reaches into every spot.
“He never seems to tire of the glorious work of deliverance,” Beth Moore wrote recently on the work of grace in her life. “Sometimes we have no idea how much darkness we’re living in because our eyes have long adjusted to the dark. I just want to remind you today that he is there with you. There is no place so dark he would not enter to bring you into the light.”
I know this form of rescue. Often? It hurts like a bitch. We enter darkened cinemas or bedrooms or caves of our own making, places we sought for enjoyment or rest or safety, only to be rudely expelled from them into the glaring light, where we’re forced to bear the beams of love–the brutal, beautiful beams of love.
My children are so often the conduits of that brutal grace. I don’t know why it still surprises me, that I make mistakes with them that I regret later but that lead to moments of such searing redemption–the Kanye-less version of the wrongs that helped me right my songs. These moments of seeming darkness–expletive-laden exclamations over disastrous morning preps while the plumber sealing the shower upstairs pauses to listen–followed by tears, followed by rides to school drenched in forgiveness and new understanding. There is no light without the dark. When will I learn? I bring one, grace brings the other. Always.