Shadowlands

We cling to shadows in this world.

All around us we are presented with options, choices, decisions regarding what to pursue and what to turn our backs on.  Each moment is faced with a choice.  Will I choose the good and spurn the evil?  Or will I turn to that which satisfies but for a moment, and forget the good all around me?  But it isn’t quite that simple.  It is never, or at least rarely, a choice between one good thing and one evil thing.  Nor is it a matter of clearly perceiving that which is good and true versus that which is bad and false.  Rather, these choices present themselves in a much different manner.  In ages long past, perhaps good and evil were clear.  When man still walked in the Garden it would seem he knew the difference, and no thought was necessary.  So innocent was he that each hour, each moment he went about his life choosing the good and spurning the evil, not because he was faced with a dilemma and continually chose the right path, but because he was so ignorant of the evil that the possibility of choosing it did not even occur to him.  But something changed.  Deception entered the world.  The snake spoke his great lie, a lie dripping with truth, but it was only a shadow.  Adam saw the shadow and perceived it as the thing itself, and ever since his fall humanity has been doing the same.

Deception is perhaps the greatest tool in the armory of the devil.  The small lies, the little misdirections based on so much truth, twisting and bending ever so slightly that the thoughtless and distracted heart never even notices the difference.  And so he presents us with choices, legions of choices, all at once.  We become overwhelmed, we squirm and wriggle under the pressures of the day’s demands, or we lose sight of the goal and fall pray to apathy and laziness.  In the end, we too choose the lie.

We are like those who stand before a shadow.  In it we recognize a form and a shape.  We see that this is like the thing we are searching for.  We perceive truth and form in it.  But we spend so much time looking to the shadow that we do not see the thing itself, the standing stone that casts it, the solid true form that blocks the light of the sun.  We cling to the shadow because we think it the thing, and our eyes grow dim and our hearts hard to the solid things of this world, to the true things with form and purpose.  They become too hard on our eyes, and when we see for a moment that which is true we swiftly turn away to the shadow, the solid form too bright for us, too hard, too full of meaning.  We are no longer able to withstand things that are true, and so we ourselves fade into shadows.  Our light goes out.  Our own true form becomes terrible in its awesomeness, in its reflection of the Creator who made it.  We see only the flaws, and turn in terror, doing everything we can to ensure no one else sees us, no one knows who we truly are.  We fade into the shadows, because it is a shadow that we wish to be.

This is the work of the deception of the devil.  This is the constant lie that we burrow into.  This is the death that we all, shadows together, live.  We console ourselves through shadows of reality.  We cling to that which appears true but cannot harm us.  We grasp at thin air, thinking it solid, and wonder why it leaves us empty.  It is quick.  It is easy.  It is simple, even pleasurable.  But it is empty, fruitless, worthless.

Each day passes us by, and we choose the melodrama of actors and fictions over the solid lives and true tales of our fellow man.  We cling to the accomplishments of false worlds with minimal effort instead of the tough achievements of difficult labor and long time.  We gratify the senses with images and film, and leave the rugged reality of God’s creation and of human struggle in our stead.  Our footsteps become few, and our footprints with them.  Our conversations become empty, and our relationships with them.  Our thoughts become mechanical, and our lives with them.

How, then, do we let go of the shadows?  How then can we find a way out of the death we now live?  Do not turn to human willpower.  That, again, is another shadow, another deception.  Human ability is feeble and weak.  It is only a shadow of another’s.  Turn to Christ.  Turn to His strength, His power, His dominion over it all.  Ask Him to reveal the shadows for what they are, and strengthen your eyes to look upon solid things again.

I say turn.  Do not sit still.  Do not be deceived into inaction when you see that there is nothing you can do.  First we must empty ourselves of the deception of self, the self worship and self reliance.  Then we must fill ourselves with a reliance upon Christ.  We must run toward Him.  We must trust in His promises.  We must have faith, not in faith itself, but in the man, Christ.  He came, the True Light that shines in the darkness.  He lived in the midst of the shadows and showed them for what they truly were.  He died that our eyes might be opened, that we look no longer at the shadows, that we stare no longer into our own dark desires, into our own atrophied will, but that we may see Him, that we may know Him, and that we may run the race He has set before us, always striving, not on our own power, but through submission to Him.