Enjoying the Night

I'm writing late at night once again from my sacred space, a place designed to house plants but well suited for meditating and writing. I built the greenhouse for my wife, but I sit here often, accompanied by a small assortment of Kimberly Queen ferns, a potato vine that insists on conquering its surroundings, a Bird's Nest fern, a grapevine that yielded grapes last month and then needed an escape from the summer sun, and an understated begonia. As I said, it's an eclectic mix. Tonight I'm able to see across the way to our neighbor's fire pit, and even though it's August in central Texas we've had enough rain this summer to lift the burn ban. "Sparky" (my wife's nickname for our neighbor) is making the most of this window of incendiary freedom. Life on a country lane is simple, especially after dark. Nights are a gift from God. 

As a boy the dark terrified me. I still remember crouching in bed, pulling covers over me like a cotton force field, quoting mantra-like the first Bible verse I ever committed to memory--"What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee" (Psalm 56:3). The night no longer frightens me; in fact, I embrace it as solace for body and spirit. Insects exclaim the glory of their Creator while I do the same in mind and heart. Traffic sounds in the distance encourage me for the very fact that they remain in the distance. This space to be, the close of a day to consider what it means to be, is a divine gift, and I guard it jealously. When schedules get hectic and the demands on my time exceed the time available to fulfill them, I experience the full grief cycle, albeit in a shortened span: denial, anger, acceptance. But tonight there is no grief, no anger, and nothing to accept apart from a peace so strong that it must be a sweet shadow of the greater peace that awaits beyond time and space. Author and speaker Barbara Brown Taylor encourages just such a transformed view of the night in "Learning to Walk in the Dark."  Instead of avoiding the dark's mystery or opposing it as some nocturnal enemy, try seeing it as a gift. Pause, remember, evaluate, meditate, dream, pray, and most of all, enjoy

"I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name" (Isaiah 45:3, KJV).