Guest Josh Stegenga on First John

"We write this to make our joy complete. Light and Darkness, Sin and Forgiveness This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” – 1 John 1:4-5

As little children, we snuggle tight under the covers on our beds. At some point, there is a struggle and fight with anxiety as darkness covers the room and our adolescent imagination begins to manifest what could be lurking in the shadows; in the dark places that we can’t see. We learn early on that bad things are in the dark; bad things are in places that we cannot see.

As we grow older, we become less anxious about the dark places; we believe that maybe they could be safe. Most games of hide and seek are played outside after the sun goes down. The darker the hiding place, the better off we will be. To be the last one found means that you are the survivor.

I wonder, though, if subconsciously we carry this idea with us throughout life. Bad things happen to us all, and we often have the assumption that the fewer people who know, the better. Not only are we the victims of tragedies, but we prey on others as well, and the same idea reigns true; the fewer people who know what I’m doing, the better.

We practically spend our lives in the dark. As we get even older, we realize that this life has to have purpose, but what we didn’t realize before is that purpose is out there… out there in the light. That’s why life can be so frustrating. We live in the dark and we stumble around. “What is the point of all this?”

I lived a majority of my life here. Alone in the dark, and I stumbled around with no purpose and total frustration. All the depression, all the thoughts of leaving this all behind; I was tired of it. I was tired of living alone. I wanted to find love, but not just someone or something to give love to, but someone or something that would love me back. So I took a risk and stepped into the light.

It’s like that first time you open your eyes in the morning. Everything is blurry, but when you really start to focus in, everything looks so much better. You feel more alive and energized. Everything else is awake and alive with you. The birds are singing, cars are driving, and you are glad you can start over one more time.

For some of us, the story is like this. We live a certain way; we live a certain story. It’s dark and we keep it hidden because we are afraid of what people will say if they see it. All our sins and past regrets are on the mental pages of our minds, and there’s not a whole lot of good to read. On our own, there’s not a lot that we can do about it; the story keeps the same plot and the same characters.

Until we give it up. We ask another Author to come in and write our story for us. We begin to shine a light on all those old pages in our old story, and the beautiful thing about light is that it fades things. It fades out all those stains and it exposes all those dark places that we were afraid to show before. Nothing is hidden and all we want is for others to feel the same warmth and shine that we feel.

So cheers to deep breaths of warm sunshine, and still having a childlike fear of the dark. Cheers to the sun rising on second chances and fading out the pages on things that need to be forgotten.

**Josh is the founder and chairman of His Scars To Our Scars.