Darkness

Unknown to most of you, there is a small group studying The Dark Side.


Before you think of Star Wars or bring up images of occult practices, understand that each of us has a Dark Side.

St. John of the Cross (16^th Century) wrote a poem that, later, he penned into a booklet entitled The Dark Night of the Soul. Most of you have been there at one time or another. It is that period in one's life where loneliness resides, where none other walks beside us, where, at times, it seems as though God Himself has left us for another path in another place. These are the times and the places we do not want to talk about. We want others to think we are on top of the world, that all is well within the scope of our life. Yet, we know it hasn’t always been true. We have wandered the lonely paths ourselves from time to time. Sometimes it seems more like a lifelong journey than one element of life’s journey.


The Dark Night is where we finally meet the Savior. It is the place where the grace of God, over time, becomes more real than ever before. It is not always a bad place. Most pastors travel it far more often than they will ever tell their congregations. Leadership lends itself to lonely journeys. It is a place of longing but not always a place of pain.

This small group is sharing a book entitled Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership. Its pages hold up those qualities that make us the leader that we are. Then they show how those very strengths sow the seeds of something more dangerous, how confidence can be so easily transformed into PRIDE (Yes, the capitalization is intentional), how love for something or someone can become a claim of ownership and a defense of what we would consider our rights, how passion for something is a single step away from the hatred of all that is not that thing for which we are passionate, and how the desire to please and make others happy becomes an all consuming, overpowering drive for the approval of others.

It is a difficult thing to look at ourselves in this way. Most of us turn away and desire to think of “happier” and “healthier” things. However, even as Socrates said, The unexamined life is not worth living, I would challenge you by saying The unexamined life is a life lived dangerously.  To ignore the dark side in one’s self is no less dangerous than to deny any addiction. To invite people to walk along our path in that Dark Night of our soul is a terrifying thing. It speaks to vulnerability. It bares our soul, the very part of that soul we most long to cover up and conceal. So, we cover up more quickly than Adam and Eve. We hide in the bushes hoping others will not see. Yet, we live in community. Living in community implies vulnerability. We become willing, hopefully, through much effort and over a considerable length of time, to be family, for it is in those dark places we most see and appreciate our need for our Heavenly Father. 


Pastor Craig