It was a warm summer evening, not quite dark, but blue-lit and past the point of shadows. The kids were running through the gardens with empty pickle jars and bare hands chasing fireflies and having middling success.
“It’s ridiculous,” I said to my husband, as we strained to see their pale outlines in the creeping darkness. “Most of the time you can’t even see where the bugs are, how are you supposed to catch them?”
“You wait until they glow,” he answered. “You look for the flash of light and try to follow it even after it goes dark. The trick is to stay focused on the light and wait out the dark.”
Life is a lot like chasing fireflies, especially a life of faith. There’s so much time spent in darkness, with only flashes of light or inspiration to lead us on. There are moments when we see the truth of Christ’s teachings so clearly and our minds become illuminated with His wisdom. We start to understand a little bit about God’s plan for our lives and we recommit ourselves to being faithful.
Then it goes dark again and we find ourselves groping along in doubt, the adrenaline of our living faith ebbing away.
“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asked Jesus. Actually, he wasn’t asking, he was telling. The Roman procurator was telling the Savior of the world that there is no truth. Or, in today’s language, “The truth is whatever I say it is.” Much like the statement of Joyce Arthur, the leader of the Pro-Choice Action Network, a powerful and influential abortion-rights group. “A fetus becomes a human being when the woman carrying it decides it does,” said Ms. Arthur, adding that it didn’t matter what scientists or moralists had to say. This is certainly Pilate’s philosophy carried to a heinous extreme.
But for faithful Christians, truth is not a changeable philosophy, it is Christ Himself. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” He instructs us, and we find that in Christ’s “reality” there is not only a roadmap for living our lives the way our Creator intended, there is liberty, fruitfulness and life beyond the grave. Jesus, the Eternal Word, is the Truth.
That is the reason why Truth is always being contested and challenged, distorted and denied. Anytime you hear the Truth twisted into lies, you know that Satan is at work. Just as the Truth was denied when He walked the earth, so He is still denied today. When we witness monstrous comments by nonbelievers and want to cry out for the sake of Truth, we are witnessing what John Paul II called, “The ongoing drama between the eternal and the demonic.”
These are the times to hold fast to the Truth and stay faithful to Christ and His teachings. While we may recognize the evils of the chaotic world around us, it is much harder to recognize the battle between Truth and lies in our personal lives, especially during times of darkness. God lets us grope in the dark in order to become completely dependent upon Him, more submissive, more Christ-like. Then we are better disposed to do His will, which is beyond our understanding.
Flashes of light are all we have to go on, sparks of light that come as graces from heaven to strengthen us in our struggles. “Stay focused on the light and wait out the dark.”
It’s a lot like chasing fireflies in the dark.
