Three days. That’s how long it had been since the power went out. At first it had been kind of 
fun, and after she and her cat 
watched white snowflakes in their persistent descent against a storm-gray sky, she’d gone to bed under cozy covers and dreamed she was at the North Pole.
Morning had brought the chill of winter indoors and realization flashlight games with Simba would hold little amusement in a room cold enough to see her breath. She’d slipped long johns on under her clothes, and pulled on two pair of socks, a hat, and gloves. Simba slipped under the comforter.
She called the power company again and got the same recorded message she’d heard the day before. It would be at least a week before everyone’s service was restored. Her small house on a little-traveled road was at the bottom of the priority list, which meant power to her house would come in seven more days at the earliest! Tonight was Christmas Eve and Christmas would essentially be blacked out. Typical. Okay. Okay. She preferred soft shadows to glaring light anyway, didn’t she?
She’d bought it – the house – with money from her grandfather’s inheritance, for solitude she’d wished for during ten years of living in the concrete jungle where she’d found comfort only in the shadows. At the time of purchase, she hadn’t thought of emergencies; only of getting away from too many people, too much light, too much everything.
Getting away from it all was good, right? The shadows of tall pines secreted her from the world. She admitted, though, that as the years passed, she’d begun to wonder if, by leaving behind some things she’d pegged as needless, she had shut out something else. Something important, perhaps.
She wrapped a blanket around herself more snugly and stared at the Christmas tree she’d set up in the corner. It seemed somehow ridiculous with all light stripped from its branches. Little ornaments hung listlessly. Suddenly, a glass ballerina she’d had since childhood broke from the cold. Was it a sign? She shook her head to clear it. The cold must be doing things to her mind. She began to wonder if the shadows that had weaved in and out of her life were of her own making. Did no one love her or had she simply shut love out? Humph. Nonsense. She laughed mirthlessly as she swept up the pieces.
And as a nearly invisible weak winter sun sank below the horizon, the shadows began to change from cozy to ominous. Warmth and light suddenly seemed unattainable. Her life wasn’t one to which good things came, something she’d repeated for years like a mantra. And miracles (for that’s what it would take)? That was just a charming word, more fiction than fact. Two days had passed and she was already quite miserable. It hung over her like an unlit candle: that sense of dread that night would stretch on forever and light would disappear.
She stretched out on the couch, Simba next to her, and wished for the week to be over, the week the power company claimed it would take to turn the power back on. Wind from the storm rattled the windows and drafted through minute crevices.
She closed her eyes and allowed herself something she’d always strictly forbidden: She thought of Christmases past; of people from long ago; of out-of-key church choirs and imperfect cookies and snow-trampled sidewalks. And she began to remember stories told by long-silenced voices she had dismissed as out-of-touch. A baby born in a shadowy cave and placed in a manger. Of a God so loving He sent His own Son and called Him Light. If only it were true. If only light filtered into sad, sightless, cold shadow and brought warmth. Please. Please send light. Please, she thought. Or was it a prayer? She drifted in and out through the night, the unforgiving cold disallowing sleep. Then sometime near the dawn of the third day it happened. She saw it first, then felt it. Light! Warmth! And Christmas Day – the day God sent Light into the shadows of the world – broke through. After all, light casts no shadow.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. John 1:9; Images: Pexels.com