Light shines in the dark places

It's a been a couple of weeks since I put finger to keyboard and blogged. The reason is simple-lots to blog about, few words to express it all. It has been a challenging start to the new year. Over Christmas one of the young men at church went missing and eventually his body was recovered from the river that runs through the town. It is a truly tragic event, made more tragic (if that were possible) by the likely nature of his death. It would appear that he was involved in some sort of incident with a small group of other young men and somehow he ended up in the water.

There is currently, much debate in the British media about the levels of violence and poor behaviour in our so-called binge drinking culture. Lots of questions about how and why and what we should do to change things. I have no easy answers. Whether Robert's death is in any way due to this cultural acceptance of bad behaviour fuelled by excessive alcohol, is not the point and certainly doesn't change the nature and impact of the tragedy. But I wonder what a Christian response, a truly Christ-like response should be?

Robert's parents are acting with enormous grace. But on a wider scale what are we to do? Again I have no 7 or 10 point action plan. I do have one commitment though, and it is this: No matter how dark the darkness gets, I am not going to forget that light always overcomes the darkness. It would be so easy to throw up hands in horror and give up on a society so full of problems and so far from God that any sane Christian would see that the job is too big, the effort to costly to try and change a thing. But it's always worth the effort. If God will send his Son and if his Son will go all the way to the cross on our behalf, then it's always going to be worth the effort to try and bring the grace of God to bear on our world.

In 1985, or thereabouts,  I heard Clive Claver address the Baptist Assembly of Great Britain. He spoke with great passion and the sense of something he said that evening has stayed with me ever since. He spoke about the darkness. About how it was the nature of darkness to be dark. About how we could not blame the darkness for being dark because it was it's nature to be dark. The problem, he said, was with the reluctance of the light to shine in the dark places.

So, even in the context of this tragedy, I will continue to be committed to letting light set the agenda. Instead of condemning the darkness I will call forth light, I will seek God to act but not in judgement or vengeance but with grace and compassion.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.