Accept The Dark

I am reading a true story about a man who lost everything. He lost three generations of women in his family in a car crash: his wife, mother and daughter.

During the following months of brokeness, he had one recurring dream, of being in a desolate wilderness. The sun would start to set and as the dark closed in behind him, he’d start sprinting, trying to remain and catch up to the light, but it was impossible. He couldn't reach the sun and in a moment of desperation, he turned around and saw the dark closing in around him and was immediately filled with terrible fear and pain.

He told his sister about the dream and after some thought she came back to him and said:

"You can never catch up to the light, no matter how hard, how fast you run. The only way you’ll see light again is if you embrace the dark and turn into it. To go into the dark and run towards the east, towards the sunrise. You need to go through the dark, it’ll hurt, and you’ll be fucking scared, you won’t know what's gonna happen, but you can’t keep running away from it. You need to accept the dark, to go through it, to get to the sunrise. To the other side."

(The book, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss, by Jerry Sittser.)