The Parable of the Darkened Path

So the last post was a little short, but at the time I felt like it was all that I needed to say what God wanted me to say. But as ironic as it is, God had other plans for me; he was still teaching me about giving up all control and letting God take care of everything. This week at Lifegroup God gave me a vision, a parable if you will, that he wanted me to share, first with my Lifegroup and now with everyone. It is a concept that is really deceivingly simple, and yet I never fully understood it until now. The following is the wisdom that God spoke unto me during worship tonight at Lifegroup.

In Matthew 5, Jesus says that we are the light of the earth. But what exactly does this mean? To start, every man and woman begins life in darkness: we are born into sin and we die in our sin unless we have a Saviour to bring us into the light. So let’s say you are trapped in darkness. Absolute, pitch-black darkness, you can’t see a single thing. Conventional, worldly wisdom would tell you to look for the light at the end of the tunnel and go for that, meaning that this situation is bad but it will get better. However, if I were to tell you that in order to be rescued from the darkness you needed to seek out the light yourself and make your own way to it, I would be lying to you. There is nothing you can do to make your own way out, and the darkness is so choking that you cannot even see that a way out exists. But we are not left without hope, for there is light in the darkness, coming from within you. And this light illuminates a small area immediately around you, allowing you to see just what is in front of you and nothing else.

In this small pool of light, there is a path, and you want to follow that path because you know it will bring you from darkness to the light. You don’t really know the path, you don’t know where it is going, but you know that you need to follow this path, wherever it goes, for if you stray from the path it may be very difficult to find it again. And so you put all your faith in this tiny little bit of path that shows up in the light coming from within, trusting that the path is good and will take you where you need to go, even if it is not necessarily where you would want it to go. And at some point, you may even find others in the darkness who are drawn to your light, for it shows them a path that they have never seen before and it is beautiful. And so you invite them into the light, to share with them how you came to have such a beautiful light in your life and help them get their own, so that they can go walk whatever path they happen to be revealed in their own light.

The cool thing about this is that God uses this to help many others realize the same truth; there were two others in my LIfegroup that had been revealed the same vision previously. And I don’t think it means anything, but in my vision the path I saw was made of paved bricks and was yellow, with some bricks broken and grass growing in between some of them.