Befriending Your MonstersSample

Darkness 

Darkness is a metaphor for the vulnerable place within you. It’s the part of you kept hidden, because if discovered, you could face rejection. When I say darkness, I’m referring to the place where the light shines brightest on your greatest insecurities and failures:

Where the brightness of your personality no longer covers your anxieties.

Where you no longer have the ability to mask your weaknesses.

Where you stop pretending to be what you do and instead have to take inventory of what you’ve become.

Where you can’t focus on what you will do to make it right but instead have to exist within the consequences of what you’ve done wrong.

These are reasons we don’t go into the darkness.

In Matthew’s Gospel, after Jesus emerges from the waters of His baptism, the heavens open and a voice declares, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with Whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Afterward, the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness where Jesus fasts alone for forty days, and then the devil tempts Him. It’s in the darkness of His wilderness experience that something happens to Jesus. And it’s in the darkness that covered the earth when Jesus was on the cross and died that something happens to all of us. Christians call that day Good Friday because Christianity has historically understood the benefit of the dark.

In the darkness, the lies we tell ourselves feel true. They thrive in isolation. For our freedom, we must go into the darkness, acknowledge the lies, and name them, because that’s how they lose their power.

By naming the tendency to determine your value based on sizing yourself up to friends or enemies, you illuminate the lies of the Monster of Comparison so you can see who you truly are.

By noting the presence within you of the insatiable appetite of the Monster of More that steals away your gratitude, you put light on the darkness so the darkness will not overcome you.

By acknowledging the voice that says you are what you do, the light can set you free from the Monster of Success to be defined by something more substantive than achievements and appearances.

When facing your monster is your tendency to run, become disoriented, or give up? What may this response tell you?