I once walked in darkness.
I remember times and periods of my life where I thought I couldn’t see any light at all. I thought that’s where I was meant to be, wandering in the dark, helping others get out of their own.
I can help them see the stars…I would tell myself.
I was always looking up in the night sky at the little glittering lights so far away feeling as if I was somehow stuck in a cave. Even during the day, I was there dealing with my darkness and couldn’t really understand why things were the way they were.
It was a lie.
A delusion.
My mind was playing tricks on me.
None of that was aligned with the truth. And then, it happened…
::flip::
The lights went on.
In the land of darkness lives your fear, doubt, worry, anxiety…they are deep dark roots of a poisonous tree. But in the land of light, lives love. It illuminates all. It connects you with gratitude, joy, happiness…truth. You see for the first time. You experience all that there is.
I had forgotten that I was the light.
I was made from the light.
The darkness I was experiencing was a lack of light – love – in whatever was happening in my life. There lived all of these things that afflicted me. There lived a haunting shadow of my past that seemed to rule over me. But when I turned on the lights, all of that disappeared.
When I turned it on even more, who I really was started to unfold in front of my eyes.
I don’t know exactly what it was that brought me to this point, but I can tell you without a doubt in my heart that knowing this completely has been worth anything that has ever happened in my life. Walking and dredging through the mud to be able to now understand the the light within me could shine upon all of my pain and suffering and dissolve it…well, it has made these years the greatest lesson I have ever learned.
And so I looked up to the sky once again and said…
I understand now.
The path that lays ahead of me is answerable to a single question, “Will it be love or fear today?”
I know that the fear lives within the dark and I know that love lives within the light. This darkness is only the absence of light. This fear is only the absence of love.
So when you feel that fear…pour on the love.
Dissolve it.
Delight in its retreat.
It can’t survive in the light.
It can’t grow in a space of love.
You are the light.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project