Darkness has power.  It has the power to center you.  It has the power to shut out noise and distraction.  It can force you to focus on what it is at hand, what is immediately in front of you.  It can offer you gifts beyond imagining.  At Dans le Noir darkness gives your other 4 senses the opportunity to rise to the occasion and teach that food, and dining itself, can be experienced blind but whole and fully, expansively.

For all purposes, pretenses and by every definition of the word that I know of, I am in a season of darkness.  Darkness is in my life, but it is teaching me great and mighty lessons.  Darkness IS teaching me. God is allowing the darkness to be a very great and authoritative teacher.  It isn’t the thief it wants me to believe that it is.  In fact, it is actually a catapult.  It is the very thing that is causing me to rise up into the very human that I have always been, always needed to become, and fated to grow into.  This dark season is imbibing my spine with the needed metal so that I might have the substance to chase down my destiny, my legend, my birthright.

There is a thief, one who comes to steal, kill and destroy, but in this season I have been reminded that that what he really intends to steal is our vision, our ability to see what is Real; what lasts.  To see through the darkness to what is Eternal.  To look through the fog of the moment and to wonder & wander in what could be.  Darkness can be a time of passion and promise and dreaming and remembering dreams within a dream.  A time of letting our other senses take over and sitting in the discomfort until we can begin to maybe hope again.  And then, dream again…until we remember what it’s like to taste and hear and feel and touch everything in our life again, and to do so with presence, with passion.  I am convinced that some time in the dark will do this, and so much more.

When we are in a season of darkness there IS light chasing us down from every direction, every which way we turn.  I have been convinced of this!  We must choose to reach out for it, feel for it, fumble around around for it, be humble enough to stumble and fall down on our faces to find it.  But believe me, friends, it is there, and power too, such power to be gained, and strength.  I believe this even though I do not yet feel very strong; I still believe it.  I am holding onto this hope with all my might as I journey from this season of darkness towards Light.  I know it’s for my good, even though there are moments that hurt so bad I feel severed in two.  I know that the story of my life that is being written right now looks messy and jagged and broken all to hell, but that is only outside perception, because really it is a Masterpiece penned by the ultimate Author who decided a very long time ago that my story would be one of triumph and beauty and loveliness and love and hope and goodness.  And so, I wait and I hope.

Darkness has power!  It can offer you gifts beyond your imagining!