Monsters in the Dark: Facing our Sin and Shame with God's Light

Samantha Stephenson shares how she learned to let go of shame while teaching her daughter not to fear a perceived monster in the room.

“Mommymommymommy!” The breathless stringing together of my title is familiar, but the urgency with which my daughter calls is uncharacteristic. Her voice is laced with fear, so I rush into her room. The light of the early morning creeps into the room. It’s not enough to eliminate the darkness, just enough to cast deep shadows.

The monster in the shadows   

In these shadows, apparently, lurks a monster. Cowering under her covers, my daughter points him out, and I wrestle him into the light. “See?” I pick him up and show her that the evil monster is actually a crumpled sweater, his mouth not full of jagged teeth, but an empty sleeve poking up from the pile of cloth below.    

“That’s not scary at all!” she exclaims.   

Monsters, like most of life, are scarier in the dark. Sin and shame are most powerful when we let them whisper lies in our ears. We cover them up and turn off the lights so no one will see. What that really means is that we can’t see them clearly either. In the dark, they lose their form, taking on distorted shapes that trick and terrify us. We think we are safer in that darkened room, alone with these monsters. We don’t want anyone else to see them. Terrifying as they are, we want to hide with them because, after all, we created these monsters. We deserve this fear. Shame traps us under the covers.  

Crying out for freedom

Freedom is as simple as crying out to our Father. He knows the landscape of our room. Our mess is not likely to trip Him up. He is willing to enter our darkness, to pull us out of the beds we’ve made, and turn on the lights.    

This is a different kind of scary. What we’re likely to see is far less benign than a sweater; it is also often far less deadly than we imagine. The Father knows well the rooms of our hearts. It is not He who is afraid of facing our sin. We are. He wants to come in, to clean up, to take away the darkness and the pain and fear that rules when we face our sinfulness alone.  

Sin: more dangerous in the dark

The thing about sin, though, is that it isn’t just scarier in the dark. It’s actually more dangerous. The darkness of sin doesn’t lighten on its own; it’s more like a black hole, absorbing the light, creating more and more darkness. And on our own, we can’t resist its pull.    

Luckily, we don’t have to. 

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Copyright 2024 Samantha Stephenson
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