Recently I’ve been rereading Winter Light, and reliving the painful (and almost unbearably exciting) years during which I wrote it. I wrote in medias res—when I typed a sentence, I didn’t know what would come next. I didn’t know because I didn’t know what God would do next: trusting and knowing are not, as Paul keeps pointing out, the same. I knew one thing: that God had answered me. He was alive and acting in the world—a force I could not, dared not attempt to, direct to my own ends.
Frightening, unnerving, wonderful.
I’m slightly calmer now than I was then, though many of the uncertainties of that time remain. I wouldn’t say my wife and I are getting used to the nearness of God, to last-minute rescues, to being taught in mysterious ways —we are, like everyone else, sometimes nonplussed, often frankly afraid. But we’re not quite so astonished when our Lord resolves the unresolvable. Or quite so horrified to find that “being light in the darkness” means it really is dark out.
I understand a little; not much.
And it’s true what I said: “I am a man more blessed than he deserves.”
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