«He has led me and made me walk in darkness and not in light” (Lamentations 3:2).
My paternal grandfather is a professional photographer. Since we haven’t had the chance to spend much time together, I never got to see where he worked, but I did see many of his photographs, and I could tell they were very different from the ones that I took and sent in to be developed automatically.
1 read all about the process once. To develop photographs, the film has to be taken to a dark room. There are some special chemicals that act in the dark; then the negatives are exposed to light in order to produce the final results. If the film is exposed directly to the light first, the film is damaged and the images are destroyed. But when it goes through this process, the light brings out the beauty of the images.
We also at times have to go through a dark room, and as God acts within us, we begin to reveal His image. Only then are we ready to be exposed to light. We may complain, when the truth is that He is giving us the benefits of darkness. He is allowing us to avoid burns that would make it impossible to see the final image.
Once I heard a sermon in which the pastor mentioned that at some point in our life we need to face the traumatic events in our past. They may be very dark episodes that we would prefer not to revisit, but they are there, and they are often the underlying cause of deep or even superficial problems that we deal with during out entire lifetime, and they can affect our relationship a great deal.
The pastor invited his listeners to revisit those events, holding tightly to God’s hand. Often a person needs professional help and emotional support from many people to go through moments like these, but the idea that he was suggesting was a walk with God to any event that affected us greatly. When we find the courage to face the event with God, we can realize that He was with us in those dark moments as well, and allow that traumatic, painful, or tragic situation become just another episode where He walked with us. It is as though we edit the picture with Photoshop, and our perception of the past will change, giving us a better present and future, It makes sense!
Like Jeremiah, we can say when we see the light: «The Lord’s mercies , , . are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion, ‘ says my soul, ‘Therefore I hope in Him!’ (Lamentations 3:22—24).
