The Light in the Darkness

We went on a very enjoyable sunset cruise organised by the university to celebrate the end of the orientation period and the end of the first week of classes. The views from the boat were spectacular. We saw the skyline illuminated in the orange glow of the setting sun, the sky gradually darkening and the city lighting up. It being the day that it is, the twin beams from Ground Zero lit up the sky, reaching so high that they grazed the stars. It was both beautiful and eerie; beautiful for what it was, but eerie for what it represented.

So much of what is beautiful is also oftentimes so very sad. We live in this strange dichotomy, this irreconciliable duality, where the human heart is capable of great love as well as immense cruelty.

You see, I don't think that there's a "them" and an "us". I think there's a "we", and we're all broken, and in our brokenness, we break each other.

Yet we were meant to live for so much more. He who made the sun and the stars, he who breathed blue into the sky and ignited the sunset, formed our hearts, and therein lies the beauty, for we were made in his image. But we have all rejected our first love, turning away from he who made us, and we live lives with no reference to the giver and sustainer of all life. We all go our own selfish way, and this is how we break.

But there is a light in the darkness for we were not, and we are not, left alone.

The opposite of love isn't hate - it's apathy. And he who made us loved us enough to come down to earth to be amidst us, to seek and to save, to mend and to make new, to bring beauty out of brokenness, to turn darkness into light.