I’ll never forget the day I heard my cousin read this verse from Psalm 139 to her children: “If I say, ’Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (Psalm 139:11-12 NIV). She asked her boys, “If y’all are in a dark room, & you turn on a flashlight, what are you going to see?” They both piped in energetically, “The light!!” She said, ”That’s right boys, don’t you ever forget that the light is ALWAYS stronger than the darkness.”
That simple and beautiful truth has stuck with me over the years. It’s deeply encouraged me on some of the dark nights of the soul that I’ve walked through. It’s also been a truth I've shared with younger kids in my life. I’ll never forget the day I was explaining to a few of 6yr old boys that the light was always stronger than the darkness, & how they did NOT believe me! So I had them go test it out. I found a flashlight and said, “Go take this and turn it on in every dark place you can think of, and let me know what you see!” So they took that flashlight to closets, under couches, in the bathroom with the lights turned off, & EVERY time, they would scream, “Ellie!! The light IS stronger! We can see it!!” I wrote a song about this on my new kids EP called Light’s Always Stronger, and I wrote it for every person, big and small, who has felt overwhelmed or lost in the darkness at times. My prayer is that the song and this beautiful verse that inspired the song from John 8:12 would remind us all that there is always hope because of Jesus, who is the Light of the world and who is always with us no matter how dark the night gets. Lord, may we follow you, so that even in our darkest nights, we will have the “light of life”.