Blind

I bump into Jesus everywhere. I'm not sure if it's actually Jesus, but when I trip across goodness, I always find myself labeling it "Jesus".  I guess that's what my faith is: that all that is Light and Good to this heart is in fact Jesus. It could be terrible religion.

Today Jesus was hanging out in RG's kitchen. I guess the fellowship promised in that last reading was delivered, and there I sat with a woman I like a great deal, listening to her loneliness as she realizes that she is a Light Person, and spending time with people who live in the Dark hurts her heart. She doesn't always identify as a person of the Light, and probably not as a Jesus-y person (although I've never directly asked, now that I think of it), but her spirit carries Light everywhere she goes, and my spirit is Light-ed everytime I'm with her.

All that Light is Jesus to me. And here's the thing: the Light so often is the confession of suffering. Isn't that weird? I think we assume the light that comes is just all sunshine and giggles. But it rarely is - the Light is saying out loud that life is difficult and then being able to say, But it will not break me. There is yet Life in the midst of all this Hard and Terrible.  That is Light. Jesus is the Light because he showed up in the middle of the Darkest Dark and said, "I'll hang out here with you so that you can see what's true: you're not alone." Jesus suffered. His friends suffered. And still there was Light.

One thing that may be true too, is that the darkest dark is the dark that believes itself to be light. If we find ourselves believing that our stuff and our successes and our victories are the light... well, we're blind.  We do not know where we are going because the darkness has blinded us, as John might say (1 Jn, 11).