light vs. darkness, light and rain, language of love, Jesus' death and life

I just finished a book, on recommendation of companionableills, called Story, by Steven James. It was very good. Highly recommend it. There were a few things I would depict differently, I think.

Anyway, tidbits:


James talks about light and darkness in this story a lot. They don't seem such opposites to me (fighting forces, though, yes), because darkness is the absence of light. Darkness cannot exist without light, it is not without light. It is not.
And light and darkness (as good and evil) work their wonders in such different ways.

At one point James says, "...i need some of your light to glow in my life/and burn away the darkness...i still have an echo of your image within me,/battling with this creeping stain upon my soul..."
I wrote notes:
"wash away
Rain. Leaves its own stain?
Washes in light.
Light can be heavy."
For a while I've been struggling with expressing the reason I enjoy rain so much and, specifically, Arizona rain and not necessarily any other rain. (I am determined to hate Arizona, so maybe this is why I have so much trouble.)
I have come up with this: Rain is substance.
I think I know what I mean now. I think that light can be heavy in the same way that rain can be heavy. It may wash away impurities, stains, but it also leaves a stain of its own. It penetrates and illuminates and leaves things raw and real. I am definitely blending light and rain now.
I'm sure I'm being completely incoherent.


I think that our fallen nature is not our desire to do evil, for that does not exist in that pure sense. It is our loss of touch with God and our weakness to Satan. It is our tongues and ears wrapping themselves around, becoming fluent in, the language of dark and sin rather than of light, of love.


There is so little focus on God becoming Man and I believe that this is a mistake. There is an implication, I think, that God's sole sacrifice/gift for us was His death for us but His life for us is immensely important. Because of Jesus' death, our sins can be forgiven and we can break through death, but only because of His life can we bring Him into ourselves. God became Man when we had fallen so far from the image He created us in, allowing us to don the Jesus persona. He gave us a model to mold our lives after but also made it possible. God wants us to be like Him. And so He became Man and somehow reconciled His perfect nature with our worldly, sin-stained one, making it possible for us to do the same. He found a means for cleansing our bodies so something as perfect as Christ can exist within them.
This is so difficult to explain.


These posts always form themselves at absurd hours. Not nearly as intelligible in the morning.



Current music:
Fallen Man, Relient K
Hallelujah, Rufus Wainwright