No more night

Anyone who has lain awake through a long, hard night knows that the dark hours are not like the others. Sometime after midnight the mind turns on itself, and fears that looked manageable by day grow teeth. The clock crawls. You watch the edge of the window for the first grey thinning of black, because morning is the thing you are waiting for, the proof that the night was not forever. John is shown a country where that watching is finally over. The city, he says, has no need of the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. There will be no night there at all. Set that against everything this whole journey has walked through, the dark stretches of disorientation, the nights of the soul when the dawn felt impossibly far. The promise is not merely that your particular night will lift by morning. It is grander than that. It is that there exists a country where night never falls again, lit not by a sun that rises and sets but by God Himself, who does neither. The long night the upheaval brought is not the world's last word.

If you know the particular fear of the long night, the lying awake, the waiting for a dawn that feels like it will never come, then hear this carefully. There is a place with no night at all. No sun there to slip below the horizon, no darkness to dread, because God Himself is its light and the Lamb its lamp. That does not mean your nights here will stop coming; they will still arrive and pass, dark and real. But they are not the final word over you. A day is coming with no night after it, lit by a God who does not set, whose light cannot fail or flicker or go out. So the darkness that the upheaval brought, however long it has lasted, is not forever. It has a final end, and the light that ends it is not a fragile thing that might fail again. It is God. Hold on through the watches of the night you are in. The dawn you are waiting for is not the last one; one is coming that has no dusk on the far side of it.