Playing Through the Pain: Growing in DarknessSample

Darkness is an interesting force. It’s not synonymous with the “Dark Side” from Star Wars, it’s not inherently evil, and it does not even have to be considered equal to the absence of light. The truth is that darkness can be an accelerant or an extinguisher, depending on how you interact and react to it.  

I had my first taste of real darkness when I was 14 years old. Sure, I had experienced the dark before like when I was little, and my mother turned the lights out at bedtime. Also, since my father was in the army, I had seen dark nights from vantage points all over the world by age 14.  

Fitting in is a difficult game that every kid plays. It’s a game that doesn’t have a final buzzer. I was a chubby boy, not fat, but round. Like most 14-year-olds, I was trying to find myself by who I hung out with. One night we were doing some things that we ought not have been, when we heard the sirens of the local police. The chase was on. I ran as fast as I could, yet with sweat pouring down my face, it seemed like the faster I ran, the closer the cops got to catching us and the farther my ‘friends’ ran ahead of me. Unfortunately for me, that night the chubby kid was the only one who got caught.  

When they closed the door on me at the juvenile detention center, the darkness was so thick I could taste it. Even though I didn’t fully understand then, and wouldn’t understand it for quite a while, the darkness in that room was doing something to me.  

Long before my night in juvey, there was another boy who sat imprisoned by darkness.  Just like me, the darkness was doing something to him too. Producing somethin’, developing somethin’, building somethin’… special.

It’s time to identify the dark that is producing, developing, and/or building something in you. It can feel like it’s against your will or that it is working for your benefit.

How many of us feel like we are believing for what has not yet been done?  Believing for something that was initiated in a time of darkness?  

If that’s you, I would like to invite you to explore some of the great things that God has developed in darkness. Over the next 4 days, we will discover the darkness that developed a boy long ago.  We will discover the darkness that is developing you.

True development happens in the dark.

I want to invite you to join me on a journey for the next six months. If you’re reading this in January 2021, then you’re on the front edge of something that I believe will set the stage for great growth in you and for you! 

We are going to drop a new YouVersion Reading Plan every month for the next six.

If you’re seeing this later, be sure to check out the other six reading plans that follow!