It Is Dark Before I Am Free

From about October to about March, you do not take your family anywhere.

Not because you decided to stop. Because you get in at half past five and it has been dark since four, and by some rule nobody in your house has ever spoken out loud, dark means the day is finished.

So half the year is gone. Not badly, not unhappily, just gone, and it goes every year, and every March you notice it and think: right, now we can start again.

I want to go looking for that rule, because I think it is doing more damage than any weather has ever done, and I think when you look straight at it you will not be able to find where it came from.

Because ask it plainly. What is the rule? Not on a country lane at midnight. On your own lit street, at six in the evening, with people in it and windows glowing and cars going past.

What exactly is stopping you.

The night shineth as the day

There is a verse in Psalm 139 that goes at darkness directly and does something unexpected with it.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. (Psalm 139:12, King James Version)

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

Read what is being said and what is not. It is not saying darkness is pleasant, or that people see well in it, or that nothing is different at night. It is saying that to God the two are not two categories, and that the night has no property that removes anybody from His sight.

You are not out of the light at six in the evening, and it was never a different kind of ground because a lamp came on. Psalm 139:12 puts the night and the day on the same footing before God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as permission rather than as poetry.

And notice the context of that Psalm. It is a man listing the places he could go and finding God already there: the heavens, the depths, the far side of the sea, and the dark. The dark is on a list of places that turn out not to be away.

You have a street at six that is on nobody's list of places God is not, and it was never true that half your year happens somewhere He is absent from. The written word puts the darkness among the places already occupied, and the Spirit of God is what makes a lamplit sidewalk an ordinary place to be.

Where the rule came from

Now let me have a go at the rule, because I think it is real and I think it is inherited rather than reasoned.

Most of us were sent in when the streetlights came on. That was the instruction, and for a child it was a good one, and it has stayed in the body long after the reason for it stopped applying to us.

So the thing being obeyed at four o'clock is a rule made for a nine year old, applied by a grown man with a key and a coat and full command of his own street.

Dark is a condition and not a closing time, and a lit street at six is not a lesser place than the same street at three.

You are operating under an instruction that expired, and it was never given to the person you are now. Psalm 139 treats the darkness as ordinary ground rather than as a boundary, which is exactly why the Spirit of God will not let an old curfew govern a grown man's winter.

And there is a second thing worth naming, because it is more honest than the first. Dark evenings feel like the end of the day even when they are the middle of it. That is real, and it is physical, and the answer to it is not argument. The answer is going outside, which does more to correct the feeling than anything that can be thought.

Twenty minutes on a lit street

Here is the practical part and it has one condition attached, and the condition is streetlights.

Lit streets only. The ones you already walk on in daylight, with houses on them. That is not a safety lecture, it is just the shape of this: the site is streets and parks, and after dark it is streets.

You are able to keep this entirely ordinary, and it has never once required anything adventurous to count as taking a family outside. The passage puts night and day on the same footing without asking anybody to do anything remarkable in either, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a father on a lamplit road at six.

Twenty minutes. After dinner or before it, whichever is easier. Take one of them, or all of them, or nobody.

And notice, when you are out there, that it is not the same walk. The windows are lit and you can see into people's front rooms. Everything is closer, because you can only see as far as the next lamp. Children behave completely differently in it, and most of them love it, and almost none of them have ever been out on their own street in the dark.

You are being handed a different version of the same street, and it was never a poorer one than the daylight version. Psalm 139:12 says the night shineth as the day, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a road that looks entirely unlike itself at six in the evening.