Spiritual Echolocation

“Joy still comes in the morning.”

I heard this line in a song on my car radio this morning, while taking my husband to work.  Yes, my husband has gone back to work for the first time since March!

On the way back, I asked myself, “Joy still comes in the morning, but what do you do when the night seems so long?  When there’s no light except for the occasional teasing of the sun, like the perpetual twilight people in Alaska live in for so many months out of the year?”

These last few weeks have been some of the most convulsive our country has ever seen.  I know there have been worse times in our country’s history (Civil War comes to mind).  But these last few weeks and months?  The isolation of coronavirus turned our world upside down and inside out, and then the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd — and now, the shooting of Rayshard Brooks by an Atlanta police officer — has burst open the abscess of racism in this country. It is not a clean surgery, either.

What do you do when there is no light at the end of the tunnel, not even the headlight of an oncoming train?

Whenever you take a tour of a cave, inevitably, there is the moment when the tour guide turns off the lights so that you can “see” what it is really like underground.  If you want the definition of “ink-like blackness”, that is it.  You can see nothing but black.  There’s no light for your eye to catch or to focus on.  It is truly terrifying.  You don’t dare move, you don’t dare take one step because you have no way of knowing if you will put your feet on solid ground or go hurtling down into an abyss.

What do you do?

Bats and other creatures who live in caves, who live in that sort of darkness, use what is called echolocation.  Since they can’t see, they use sound to navigate their way in the darkness.  The sounds they make bounce off of walls and help them find their way.  Dolphins and whales also use echolocation to navigate in the ocean.   Sonar uses the same principles.

I wonder if there’s such a thing as spiritual echolocation that helps us find our way in the dark, when we can’t see the joy that will come in the morning.

When the coronavirus really started to hit, it was March, right before the beginning of spring.  I kept saying to myself, spring will come, spring always comes.  Even in the middle of coronavirus, spring will come.

Well, spring came; and now it’s only four days until the beginning of summer.  And we are still dealing with the effects of coronavirus and now we are dealing with the open abscess of racism.

But spring comes, summer comes; summer will turn into fall and fall into winter.  God promised, after Noah left the ark, that summer and winter would not cease as long as the earth endured.

Right now is a time of darkness for so many of us.  The night is long and we don’t think morning will come.  Maybe you’re there right now.  I’ve been there and probably will be there again.

Maybe now, if we can’t see, maybe now is the time to use some spiritual echolocation.  Make some noise.  Pray.  Scream if you have to.  Then wait for the sound to bounce back.  Listen.  Listen for what God might be telling you.  Maybe it’s nothing more than, I’ve got this; or, remember what I have done for you before.

Spring does come, even in the middle of a pandemic.  So does summer.  So will fall, so will winter.  Sunrise does follow sunset. Even in areas of Alaska, where there is perpetual twilight during so many months of the year, the morning does come.

Joy does come in the morning.  But while we’re waiting for morning, let’s practice some spiritual echolocation.  Because God is there for the sound waves to bounce off of.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.