Pinpricks

In the wilds of New Mexico you step outside at night, feel the cool dry swirling round you, and stare up at a heaven filled with tiny dots of glorious white light. But this year I’ve moved to the big city. I knew that nightly experience was one of the things I would have to give up; what star can shine through the din and lights of seven million busy people all conglomerated in a clump in the middle of Texas? But in a large way, I was wrong. When I step outside my door at night now, a warm blanket enfolds me, and there is something shining through the dark veil of the heavens. Always, there is something. It may only be two or three planets peeking through the clouds, but they are there, breaking past the blackness. Last night when we took our four dogs walking, the moon stared at us just like the Cheshire Cat’s grin the entire time. It was so bright it was almost disconcerting, I kept expecting it to start singing nonsensical songs and fading into a striped, fat cat. Sometimes, the lights are even manmade here, and nearly as beautiful as the glories set forever in the heavens. There is a certain awesome beauty in watching a ball of light cross your sky, and knowing there are souls up there, people headed somewhere in their planes and helicopters, busy with their own lives and likely looking down on our own pinpricks of light shining up from the darkness on the ground. The dark isn’t nearly so dark as I expected.

Sometimes the soul can make a move like that. Even those of us with the Son shining in our lives have moments of darkness. It can be true darkness, such as depression, or mourning for a loved one that seems to shade over all of life. Or, it can be the daily grind and monotony clouding over the joys and lights without our even noticing it. The wear and tear of every day spent in this broken world can begin to tell on us. It is too easy to fall into the trap of thinking this place is all that is, to forget where we actually belong. To forget there is a better land, and even this world will be renewed. To stop along the path, forgetting for a moment as the darkness closes in, that we were even headed to higher ground and a Celestial City. Pilgrim, you need to remember.

Stars can rekindle your joy in the quest. The lights sprinkling the darkness are nightly, visual guides to a better, truer thing. They stay there, unwinking, slowly rotating as our globe moves, telling us plainly that the darkness cannot last. That there is more out there. More to come.

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach[1].”

There is an awe-inspiring wonder in staring up at the heavens. Our age isn’t the only one to feel it.

“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him[2]?”

But there are moments when even the stars have no ability to kindle our hearts back to the light. When our souls are so deadened, so used to what they see around them, that the head never even lifts to the heavens. Night comes and we close the blinds, and shortly after head to bed, to get the rest needed for yet another day. Is there a method to reaching such a tired, blackened, bewildered soul as this poor pilgrim? God has many ways, dear friends, and no despair is too dark for Him to penetrate. But there is one method I would mention, that perhaps you should be cultivating as a habit in your life, just in case such a situation arises, and you need that pinprick of light to awaken your soul back to the realities of the deeper realities than what the blackness whispers to you exists.

Read books. Make it a habit to pick up a book and read a bit every day. Not only blog posts and articles, but an actual book. It might be a history book, filled with stories of peoples in past eras and deadly and heroic deeds. It might be a theology work, extolling the glory of the thrice holy God. It might be poetry, lines of alliteration lilting off the page to burst into song in your heart. It might be a simple work of fiction, just a good story you pick up for fun. But I’ll tell you something, dear readers.

Words have light.

They can act as pinpricks in the dark, just like a star. A book is one soul pouring their thoughts onto a page in printed words, words that your soul responds to. We recognize the acts, emotions, cares, and truths contained in the books we read, because we are all fundamentally the same. We are souls created in the likeness of God, vessels made either for honor or dishonor, every one of us with the sacred and the earthly stamped upon us. And in an amazing stroke of awe-inspiring wonder, we are all a little different too. Books have a way of sparking into us partially because of that sameness, and that differentness. The author of the book on your shelf knew many of the same truths as you. But they have a different way of stating it. Sometimes a truth stated in a different way can spark through every black cloud and shine a white light straight into your soul.

Reading a book is a perilous business. It is opening a door to hear someone else’s thoughts, to let in their light. Or their dark. Be careful which books you choose, be very careful. There are some works out there that spread the dark of their authors, not the light of any sort of truth. But there are other books that have beauty and joy that wrenches you free, that startles you into remembering the world is more than the black cloud, that make you leap out of bed and step outside to breathe the air and stare up at the Cheshire Cat moon.

Words can awaken you. They can inspire and spark and sizzle till you simply have to do something, if only laugh at all the world’s black despair.

The darkness is only a passing thing, after all. The war is already won. Yes, we have many skirmishes still to fight, and the miles to the Celestial City can seem very daunting some days. But there is always a light along the way, guiding our steps.

“We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts[3]:”

There is one book in particular you must make a habit of reading on your way. God has given you a sword that pierces through anything the devil may throw. When the darkness presses and life itself seems to be smothering you, remember the one book that God has given us as a weapon, that He has promised will always be here, till the end of time. Never neglect the Bible. Always study the Word. Never let the habit drop, no matter how busy life gets, or how dull you may feel. God will use that weapon mightily if you let Him.

               

And while the Bible is like a searchlight suddenly searing through every cloud wrack and dissipating the darkness as if it never was, other books can be pinpricks that help the searchlight sputter into life. Keep reading. Let the words tell you the colors of the gates leading to heaven[4], of the real world that only keeps getting bigger the farther you go into it[5], of the Mended Wood[6], of the laughter and freedom in creating the lights right here on earth even if that creation starts as nothing but a chalk dragon[7].

Words have power. Cultivate the right power inside you, and let the light in. Once the light is in you, and in you firmly, that is when it can start to shine out and prick the souls of those you come in contact with. Everyday isn’t a grind, not really. It is an opportunity. An opportunity to brush up against another soul and maybe kindle a spark through their darkness with a word of your own.

But that’s a whole different post for another day. Right now, remember to look up. Hold your head high, pilgrim, and keep watching the stars, like the dreamers and poets. And when you come inside, let your hand stray to that dusty book. Keep reading.

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Return of the King (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993, page 957)

[2] Psalm 8:3-4 (KJV)

[3] 2 Peter 1:19(KVJ)

[4] “He stood a moment with erected brows,

In silence, as a creature might, who gazed:

Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes

Upon the thought of perfect noon. And when

I saw his soul saw, - ‘Jaspur first,’ I said,

‘And second sapphire; third, chalcedony;

The rest in order,…last amethyst.’” –,Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the last lines of Aurora Leigh (Academy Chicago Limited, 1979, page 351)

[5] “But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” –C.S. Lewis, from The Last Battle (Harper Collins, 1984, page 211)

[6] “The song had gone on for a while, lamenting verses, offset by the hopeful refrain ‘It will not be so in the Mended Wood.’ She thought of all the times she had heard rabbits in this community counter a despairing word with this phrase. She had thought it was only a word of encouragement. She hadn’t realized they were singing to each other a song of hope.” –S.D. Smith, from The Green Ember (Story Warren Books, 2016, page 313)

[7] “Henry, let your imagination be as wild as the spinning universe. Let it be beautiful and adventurous and even terrifying. Let it go free. Don’t be afraid. But remember that art does things you don’t expect. Remember that it can hurt people, but remember that it can make them happy as well. Remember that it can break things and stomp on things sometimes, and that’s where chivalry comes in…” –Jennifer Trafton, from Henry and the Chalk Dragon (Rabbit Room Press, 2017, kindle location 1645)