No evil? None? I won't fear any evil? Can I promise myself that? Can I hold to that statement of faith? In the shadow? Much less a shadow of death? Wow. That's a scary place to be. In the darkness, evil all around waiting to eat you up. But we go there, we have too.
There are portions of our lives that the darkness has to stamp out our vision briefly, so that we might walk by faith. Calling out to who we know will guide us in our blindness, even though our eyes are wide open. But sometimes we don't call out in our times of darkness. You see, the valley is a scary place to be but it's design is divine. In the valley when we call out in faith, our voice echoes off the high places in the mountains, rattling off the sides of the hills for miles, amplifying our voices as we cry out. God hears us.
So what happens when we find ourselves in the darkness of the valley. We hear calls of evil beings, mocking us, laughing at us, rustling close to us. Panicked, at first, we may run for it. We might keep quiet hoping nothing will find us there and we book it, for one reason or another. Next we might get a little tired and feel around and find a large boulder to hide behind. The thing we find there are not good. This is where those mocking things hide and live as well. Here we are in solitude away from anything that could help us, but we are in the perfect position to fall into the traps of these devils. Faith to call out to God rips us away and he slowly guides us away from the darkness.
Though the darkness is not where God dwells, he knows it well, it is creation as well. He knows that sometimes we put ourselves in the darkness, or maybe sometimes things happen in our lives that we do not give up to God to deal with therefore putting us low in the valley, heavy laden. Any way that we end up in the valley of the shadow of death, there will be evil dwelling there.
We should not fear evil. That seems impossible. But I'm going to suggest a very Sunday school answer here; with God nothing is impossible. In our "seasoned" years of being a Christian we feel that we should know these things, and yeah yeah....with God nothing's impossible, okay tell me something I don't know, wow me with theology. But I think when we are in the valley deathly afraid of the evil that resides there....the evil we might become....we discount the fact that God is Almighty, nothing is too big for him, our God is bigger than _____, you fill in the blank, he's bigger.
Faith brings us out of the valley. Faith that God can, will, and has before. We must also be willing to have faith that he can heal us, even through the bleeding, gaping, life threatening wound left by the sin and evil of the darkness, he is the Almighty Physician.
The darkness will not prevail
The valley will be laid to waste
Our God is bigger than the mountains surrounding the valley
Our Savior has already destroyed death in it's dwelling
Face the darkness in faith
Face the darkness.
All to God
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