I Do This In The Dark Now

The switch by the door does not get touched any more.

You go in with the little light over the stove throwing something down the hall, or the glow from the landing, or nothing at all. Your hands know where everything is. The washing, the teeth, the cream on the hands, the hair pushed back. All of it in the half dark, and all of it perfectly manageable.

Nobody has noticed, because there is nothing to notice. A woman who does not put a light on is a woman being quiet because the house is asleep, or a woman with tired eyes, or a woman who never thinks about it. Any of those would explain it, and I would guess you have said two of them out loud to somebody.

I want to sit with you for a few minutes in the version of this that nobody says out loud.

The dark is not a preference. It is a negotiation. Somewhere along the line a settlement got made between the part of you that needs to wash her face and the part of you that does not want to see it happen, and the settlement was: fine, but not with the light on.

And it has held for years, and it has cost you almost nothing, which is exactly why it has never been examined.

In my grandmother's house there was one bulb in the hallway and a lamp in the front room, and the light was rationed the way everything else was rationed. But she never once did anything in the dark that she wanted to do properly. If she was going to make bread, the lamp came on. If somebody was going to be looked after, the lamp came on. Light was for the things that mattered.

I have thought about that many times, and here is what it left me with. We do not put the light on for what we are ashamed of. We put the light on for what we are attending to.

So the question underneath your light switch is not whether you can bear to look at your face. It is whether your face is a thing you are attending to, or a thing you are getting past.

The light was never the problem

Here is the first thing worth knowing, and it will sound too small to matter.

The dark is not hiding you from anybody.

It is not hiding you from the people in the house, who have seen your face at every hour of the day for years and formed their opinions long ago. It is not hiding you from the person you will be at breakfast. It is hiding you from exactly one person, for about four minutes a night, and the arrangement resets every single evening because nothing was ever settled.

That is worth naming plainly. The arrangement does not accumulate. Ten years of washing your face in the dark has not produced ten years of relief. It has produced ten years of the same four minutes, one at a time, with the account never closing.

You are not hiding from anybody who is actually in that house, and this arrangement has never once settled the thing it was made to settle. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what a habit is actually costing her, and Psalm 139 is where the written word says God sees in the dark exactly as He sees in the day.

And notice what the dark has quietly done to the rest of it.

Washing your face used to be care. Somewhere in the negotiation it stopped being care and became evasion with a washcloth in its hand. The same two minutes, the same water, the same movements, and a completely different intention underneath them, because now the whole exercise is organized around not seeing.

That is the part I would take back first. Not the light. The intention.

You are able to make those two minutes care again tonight, and the water and the washcloth have never once been the thing that changed. It is written in Psalm 139 that the night shineth as the day before God, which means nothing about you was ever actually concealed, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a habit from evasion back into care.

Darkness that hides nothing

There is a line in the Psalms that I think has been read as comfort when it is actually a release.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. (Psalm 139:12, King James Version)

Read what it says about God before you read what it says about you.

There is no hour of the day in which God sees you better or worse. There is no lighting in which He gets a more favorable impression. The overhead bulb does not give Him information. The dark does not withhold any. He has been looking at the same face the entire time, in the same light, which is His own.

Which means the dark has never been protecting you from the only opinion that finally matters. It has only been protecting you from your own.

And your own opinion, as it happens, is the one that has been running unchecked for years without a single interruption, because you have arranged the room so that it never has to meet any evidence.

You are not being spared anything by the dark, and God has never once had a worse view of you at night than He had at noon. The Spirit of God is the one who lifts an opinion off a woman that she has been carrying alone, and the written word in Psalm 139 says the darkness and the light are both alike to Him.

Now, that is not an argument for staring. I am not going to ask you to stand in front of a mirror and study anything, and I am not going to tell you what you will see when the light goes on. Nobody who loves you should be making promises about a face they cannot see.

What I am saying is smaller and much harder. The light is not a verdict. It is only a light.

You are able to be in a lit room with your own face, and a light bulb has never once had the authority to say anything about you. Scripture puts the seeing with God rather than with the switch on your wall, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in that room whichever way the switch is turned.

One minute, with the light on

So here is what I would actually ask, and it is deliberately unimpressive.

Tonight, turn the main light on before you start, and leave it on until the washing is done.

That is the whole thing. Not a minute of looking. Not a resolution about mirrors. Not a promise about tomorrow night. One ordinary wash, at the usual hour, with the light on.

Two instructions come with it, and they matter more than the light does.

You are being handed two instructions rather than a verdict, and neither one of them has ever once asked you to look at anything. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness and the light are both alike to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a small act from turning into an inspection.

The first: do not use the light to check anything. If the light goes on and the inspection starts, the dark was more honest and it would be better to go back to it. This is not an opportunity to finally get a proper look at whatever has been avoided for years. That would be correction wearing a brighter coat, and correction is not what we came for.

The second: do it slowly. Slower than necessary. The speed is where the evasion actually lives, more than the darkness does. A woman who is getting something over with moves fast, and a woman who is caring for something does not.

You are able to stay in a lit room for two unhurried minutes, and the speed has never once been about the time available to you. The Holy Spirit is what makes a small physical act into an act of care rather than a task, and the written word says God is present in the darkness and the light alike.