31 Days of Hope - Day 11

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.” 

 Psalm 23:4

“I will fear no evil, for You are with me…” Easier said than done, right?

Right after Pastor Rick Warren’s son went to be with Jesus, he preached an incredible sermon series that I clung to as I walked through my own first months of grief. In it, he made the following great points about shadows:

1. They can’t hurt us. Scare us? Yes. But hurt us? No. We tell our children on a dark night, “It’s just a shadow.” We know the truth that the actual shadow is nothing to fear when they don’t, so we speak the truth to them. And we will have to speak the same truth to our own hearts when we are hit with life’s shadows. There may be something very difficult the shadow represents, like the shadow of death mentioned in this verse, but the shadow itself cannot hurt us when we are children of the Father.

2.  Shadows always appear bigger than they are. Usually they are pretty much just a bigger distorted version of a reality. So yes, the reality of whatever we are facing may be pretty hard, but we often blow it up in our heads to be even bigger. Our fear just makes the hardship worse.

3.  Where ever there’s a shadow, there’s a light. Think about it. That’s just how shadows work. If it was all darkness, there couldn’t be a shadow. A shadow forms because of the way an image is reflected in partial light. There must be light in existence for the shadow to be created.

Let’s choose to seek the Light of the World today, even though it might take an entirely new perspective of the shadows we face. He’s there with us, even through our times of deep darkness.