Have you ever thought about darkness?  Darkness can be depicted as a person, a place, a thing, or a state of mind.  It can mean something warm and cozy for some people and for others, it can be a scary, unsafe place.  Without darkness, there can be no light.  The stars in the sky are invisible without it, the lights of a Christmas tree through a window are not as bright.

A friend of ours posted in Facebook that all of the lights are off of his house and everything around his house, the hashtag being “HelloDarknessMyOldFriend”.   Is the darkness our friend?  What do we do when we want to hide?  We create darkness.  Horror movies tend to focus on the unknown in the dark, the only thing piercing the dark perhaps a flashlight or a candle, allowing us to see what is directly in front of us but not allowing us to see everything around us.

We talk about the dark night of the soul and the light at the end of the tunnel.  Bad guys wear dark black hats and good guys wear light, white hats.  Jesus said he is the light of the world and if we follow him we will never walk in darkness.  We love it when days get longer and there is more light and dislike it when the days are shorter and there is more darkness.  Some people suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder because of the change in seasons.

Darkness can be so dark you can “cut it with a knife”.  There are different degrees of darkness from twilight to pitch black.  There is nothing darker than a country road at night where the only thing between you and darkness are the headlights on your car, shining only on what is directly ahead of you but perhaps missing things beside or behind you.

Once upon a time In high school, on the the way back from a band contest about an hour and a half away from home, the headlights on the car my friend was driving went out on one of those country roads.  Oh sure, we could have taken the freeway but it was more fun and less busy on the country road.  Unless of course the headlights stop working.  We had parking lights, but it’s not the same.  That ride, in a car surrounded by darkness was a little scary, but there’s something about being in the dark that heightens your senses and makes you feel more alive.  My being here today is proof that we survived that scary drive but the memory is etched in my mind.

Tonight on a whim we decided to drive to our favorite little Chinese restaurant in a little town south of home, meaning we would have to drive on some little two lane country roads.  Ironically, I had decided I was going to write about darkness tonight and we were discussing all of the things I have written about so far.  The stars were so bright against the dark sky, the lights from our town shone in the distance, our headlights and the occasional headlights of other cars our only light source on those dark roads.

Suddenly my brake foot slammed the floor, which was weird because I was on the passenger side, and I shouted “Deer!  Deer!  Deer!”  Simultaneously, my husband stomped on the brake and swerved sharply to the left as I looked right into three sets of deer eyes in the headlights, They weren’t running, they were calmly walking across the road, and we were unable to see them in the dark until we were almost on top of them.  I waited to hear a thump or bump of some kind and thank goodness nobody was coming from the other direction, but somehow we missed all three of them and managed not to run off of the road.

After my husband got us back in our lane and our hearts started beating again I started to laugh.  “Now I’ve got something to write about!”.  I’m not sure that little incident was what I was looking for exactly, but it proves my point.  You never know what is in the darkness.  It could be nothing.  It could be something scary.  It could be all my imagination. Or it could be a deer or three in the headlights.