From the book “The Crossroads,” Richard L. Evans shared:
A sentence recently read offers these words of wise and comforting counsel: “Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.” No doubt most of us at times have turned our troubles over in the hours of the night when sleep has fled us. And in the dark hours of the night troubles tend to be multiplied and imagined.
If our loved ones are out and overdue, it isn’t difficult to imagine dark and dire things—in the hours of the night. And then, finally, as they return well and whole, the load is lifted, and we wonder what we so much feared and fretted.
The shades of discouragement and despondency are darker and deeper in the hours of night, and small things loom, and large things sometimes seem utterly insurmountable. In the restless hours of the night it isn’t difficult to imagine all manner of maladies and malignancies. Indeed, on a dark and sleepless night, with all its tossings and turnings, we could churn up many troubles inside ourselves.
Job poignantly complained that ‘wearisome nights are appointed to me. When we lie down I say, When shall I arise, and night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.’ 105
But despite all the real or imagined difficulty and discouragement that come with darkness, the dawn does come, and the load does lighten with the coming of daylight. Even when our worries are, and even when they don’t altogether disappear, the light of day tends to lift and lighten them.
Thank God for light, for the dawning of each day, for the reassuring brightness of the sun—for much of what darkens and disturbs us doesn’t seem so darkly serious, so utterly insurmountable, in the daylight as it did at night. And because the darkness distorts, because it clouds and conceals, in darkness we should make no needless decisions and reach no needless conclusions, but wait to look at our problems in the light—wait for the natural waking hour, when “the morning breaks; the shadows flee.”106 ~Richard L. Evans From the Crossroads, (Harper and Brothers, Publishers, New York, NY, 1955) 207-08
