There are thoughts that knock politely. This was not one of them. It came like something scratching from inside the walls—quiet at first, then persistent, until I could no longer pretend I had not heard it. My mind has always been an odd place to live. Schizophrenia has made some corridors darker than others, and there are days when even my own thoughts seem like strangers wandering through rooms I thought I knew. Yet sometimes, in that strange wilderness, a question appears that refuses to be dismissed. I was thinking about sinners. Not us. Them. That is how we usually think of it, isn't it? The sinner is always somewhere else. He is the addict. The prisoner. The man whose life has become a ruin. The woman whose past we whisper about. The one we hope Christ will save—provided their salvation does not require them to sit too close to us. And then the thought turned its pale face toward me: What if the worst sinner who ever lived is not someone history remembers, but the person st...
When the Light Reveals the Darkness What if God sometimes lets us see how dark the darkness is—not to make us fear it, but so that when He reveals the Light, we finally understand what we were blind to? I did not begin with the Cross. I began with a question about darkness. Not the darkness that falls when the sun disappears. Not the darkness of a room with the lights turned off. Something deeper. The kind of darkness a person can live inside without realizing he is there. Perhaps that is the most frightening thing about darkness: it does not always feel dark when you have lived in it long enough. We learn its shape. We adjust our eyes. We become comfortable with what we can no longer see. And eventually, we stop asking whether we are blind. We simply call what we see normal . Then I began to wonder: What happens when Light finally enters that darkness? Perhaps we expect the Light to make everything beautiful immediately. But what if it does the opposite first? What if the first thin...