Passing-Thought

fear of the dark

I was talking to a friend at Starbucks a week ago Friday, and I found out that she had an infatuation with scary movies. "Why do you like watching scary movies?" I asked. "Because I want to be brave," she replied in her Russian accent. I recounted how I used to be afraid whenever I walked in the dark to get our mail from the mailbox across the dirt country road next to our house. "As I would return from the mailbox, I always had the irresistible feeling that someone was sneaking up behind me. So, I would start running, and they would start chasing me." She admitted having the same feeling. I continued, "But after I trusted Christ, I wasn't afraid of the darkness anymore. I could face it." She replied, "I come from a Muslim background, though I never observed the religious routines. Now I go to my host family's church. I'm confused."

I remember as a kid having an irresistible urge to draw pictures of Satan and evil things on a piece of paper during the sermon at church. My mom saw it and scolded me for it. Once, while my father was pumping gas at a station, I drew an angry face in the fogged up back seat window in our car. I soon found myself crying, curled up in fetal position in the seat opposite of the window, terrorized by the image I had created. My mother had to wipe it away for me. But what she could never help wipe away was the cacophony of voices through which I would dare myself to curse God whenever I thought about him as a teenager. Thus, I lived in a darkness of guilt and shame.

As I look back on my fear of darkness and the irresistible imagination to dare myself with things that might harm me, I think there is more to it than just my terrifying imagination. I was struggling with a spiritual reality. Behind the darkness was a spiritual darkness in which real spiritual powers exercise their dominion through seduction and terror. But these are only the surface of a deeper problem. In a sense, my imagination of wicked things was a means to hide from something more dreadful: the Holy and Righteous God Himself. He was really the only One that was always chasing me, confronting me the reality of our separation. My trust in Christ, then, is not merely the employment of an invincible bodyguard against cosmic bullies, but reconciliation with the One whose wrath is greater than all the power that Satan and his legion can conjure for themselves: they are not only agents of his wrath, but objects.

I have hope for my confused friend. Confusion is a necessary step towards conversion. She will never fully overcome fear of darkness by braving scary movies. You cannot overcome a desert by playing in a sandbox. God still chases. Confusion is evidence that His grace is catching up with her, as He caught me.