...but it took a bit of getting used to.
One of the biggest things I noticed was the darkness. As you look up at the night sky in Belfast, you can just about make out some blackness through the delightful orange glow. There’s nothing quite like the glow of streetlights…to block your view of the sky.
I don’t think I ever
knew how many stars you could see in the sky until I went to South Africa. I
remember one night when I got out of the car and looked up and just froze for a
couple of minutes, because it almost looked like there was more star than sky.
Everywhere I looked, there were clusters of light breaking up the black.
I loved it.
In the months I was there, I stopped often to look up at the stars.
I returned to SA a year after my first trip and was walking down the gorge one night when I looked up and saw the stars,
stars that I had forgotten about.
Sometimes, when things are going
well, it’s easy to think we’re strong and we are the reason that things are
good. It’s easy to forget about God.
So, sometimes, it has to get a
little darker to show us that he is always there.
When
I got made redundant from my first physio job in New Zealand, it was a pretty
dark time. All around the country, private practices were losing business and
physios were losing their jobs. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity around, which
was worrying enough in itself, but I had the added problem of my visa depending
on my job. So, when I was given my four weeks’ notice, I faced the prospect of
having to pack up and get out of the country in a short space of time.
Everything
pointed towards darkness, but I find it hard to even describe the light that I
saw in that time. For a reason that I can’t explain, I felt more settled in
Hamilton than I ever had done. That settled feeling had been eluding me; the search
for it had been plaguing me for two years, and it was only when the darkness
came that I found it. It was like my eyes were opened to see the friendships
I’d formed, the church I was starting to feel at home in, the gold find of a
flat we’d acquired, the chance I was getting to go to counseling and work
through many of my problems. My eyes were opened to the light of assurance that
I was exactly where I was meant to be.
In the couple of years previous to the redundancy,
things had fallen into place pretty easily for me. I’d thought my job was
secure, I lived in a good flat with good friends, I was working my way up in
rugby physio circles, friends and family had come to visit me.
And I got complacent.
I didn’t ignore God but I definitely
didn’t run to him. I thought, if not consciously, definitely at some
subconscious level, that I’d achieved a good situation by some hard work and a
bit of luck. I think I stopped listening to God, so I stopped hearing him too.
Those
thoughts of self-sufficiency and security were fully eradicated when I lost my
job, but something deeper and more incredible came from it.
My ears were
unblocked.
Sometimes I felt God speaking to me so clearly that it was like he
was standing right in front of me, holding me by the shoulders, looking me in
the eyes and telling me he had this one.
I’m
not saying that I love my life when bad things happen, when times are dark and
difficult. Of course I’m not. But that time of my life was one of the most
blessed in recent years and I can truly say I learned to appreciate the
darkness and what it did, the place it took me to…
that place of clarity,
the
place where I could see the stars.
