On a Dark and Sleepless Night…

A sentence recently read offers these words of wise and comforting counsel: “Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.” No doubt most of us at times have turned our troubles over in the hours of the night, when sleep has fled from us. And in the dark hours of night troubles tend to be multiplied and magnified.

If our loved ones are out and overdue, it isn’t difficult to imagine dark and dire things⎯in the hours of the night. And then, finally, as they return, well and whole, the load is lifted, and likely we wonder that we so much feared and fretted.

The shades of discouragement and despondency are darker and deeper in the hours of night, and small things loom large, and large things sometimes seem utterly insurmountable. In the restless hours of night it isn’t difficult to imagine all manner of maladies and malignancies. Indeed, on a dark and sleepless night, with all its tossings and turnings, we could churn up many troubles inside ourselves.

Job poignantly complained that “wearisome nights are appointed to me. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossing to and fro unto the dawning of the day.”

But despite all real or imagined difficulty and discouragement that comes with darkness, the dawn does come, and the load does lighten with the coming of daylight. Even when our worries are real and even when they don’t altogether disappear, the light of day tends to lift and lighten them.

Thank God for light, for the dawning of each new day, for the reassuring brightness of the sun⎯for much of what darkens and disturbs us doesn’t seem so darkly serious, so utterly insurmountable, in the daylight as it did at night. And because the darkness distorts, because it clouds and conceals, in darkness we should make no needless decisions and reach no needless conclusions, but wait to look at our problems in the light⎯wait for the hour, when the “morning breaks; the shadows flee.”