Life anew

I've been re-reading a favorite, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are, and this morning, as we pack and prepare to travel in four short days, these words speak loudly...

I awaken to the strange truth that all new life comes out of the dark places, and hasn't it always been?  Out of darkness, God spoke forth the teeming life.  That wheat round and ripe across all these fields, they swelled as hope embryos in womb of the black earth. Out of the dark, tender life unfurled.  Out of my own inner pitch, six human beings emerged, new life, wet and fresh.

All new life labors out of the very bowels of darkness.

That fullest life itself dawns from nothing but Calvary darkness and tomb-- cave black into the radiance of Easter morning.

Out of the darkness of the cross, the world transfigures into new life.  And there is no other way.

Then... yes: It is dark suffering's umbilical cord that alone can untether new life.

It is suffering that has the realest possibility to bear down and deliver grace.

And grace that chooses to bear the cross of suffering overcomes the suffering...

My pain, my dark-- all the world's pain, all the world's dark-- it might actually taste sweet to the tongue, be the genesis of new life?

Yes.  And emptiness itself can birth the fullness of grace because in the emptiness we have the opportunity to turn to God, the only begetter of grace, and there find all the fullness of joy.

So God transfigures all the world?

Darkness transfigures into light, bad transfigures into good, grief transfigures into grace, empty transfigures into full.  God wastes nothing-- "makes everything work out according to His plan" (Ephesians 1:11).

~Ann Voskamp

Yes, darkness always precedes light.
So as I'm praying today... praying for our precious daughter, still halfway around the world...
I'm claiming His promises!  That darkness-- her three and a half years of family-less darkness-- will indeed be transfigured into glorious, Christ-filled light!  That her bad will turn to good, that her mourning will turn to dancing, that her sorrows will turn to delight...
and that she will know-- by God's amazing grace-- true joy!

...weeping may last for the night, 

but a shout of joy comes in the morning.

Hallelujah!! Psalm 30:5b