A Different Perspective Official Podcast - Afraid of the Dark // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 1

When you’re travelling through those dark patches in life – what you discover so often is that you’re afraid of the dark. Fear is a big deal in hard times. And each one of us needs to know what to do about it.

We're starting a new series of messages on the program this week, a series that I've called, "Dark Night, Bright Light". I wonder what the word dark or darkness means to you? Darkness has all sorts of connotations when we apply it to our own lives. I remember when I was a young boy, even probably well into my teenage years, I was truly afraid of the dark.

At night after dinner in the dining room in the house where we lived it was what seemed like a long corridor to my bedroom, it was only 8 or 9 metres but when the corridor was dark, I tell you, it was a long scary way and I was afraid to walk from the light dining room into that dark corridor to my dark bedroom.

Now we were blessed because there was a light switch at either end of the corridor, at the dining room end and at the end where my bedroom was and I always, always used that light switch. Now don't get me wrong, we lived in a safe part of town and the house was secure so there was no logical or rational reason to be afraid of the dark, I just was and it was a very real fear.

It seems that darkness and fear often go together in life. Whether we're young or old the truth be known we actually need both, light and dark in this world. I love it when the sun goes down and it's time to go to sleep and again, when the sun comes up in the morning and it's time to get on with life. It's a pattern we live by, it's a cadence, a pattern of life but imagine if it were only ever dark how awful that would be. In some countries of course, far north and far south, there are many months of darkness in winter.

In life, darkness and fear, well they seem to be such common bedfellows. I guess that’s because in the dark we can't see what's coming at us. I remember once when I was in the army and we were on exercise in a rainforest and the canopy of this rainforest was so incredibly thick that it was pitch black at night, you couldn't even see your hand 6 inches in front of your face. And in that sort of darkness you can't see what’s coming at you, you can't see where you're going so darkness is a scary place sometimes.

Now let’s take a look at our own lives. We can look back on the dark times, those periods that we'd rather forget, maybe a broken relationship or sickness or the death of a loved one, real financial difficulties. Maybe you've been through a war and you've seen people killed or you've been in prison. Perhaps you've seen everything you worked for so hard over so many years just go down the drain or someone’s hurt you incredibly deeply, someone you trusted.

Perhaps you've been through a time of depression or real loneliness or working so hard you just don't feel that you have a life. The list just goes on and on and on, life has its