What Drawing at Midnight Taught Me About Patience and John 1:5
I picked up my sketchbook the other night after the kids were down. I hadn’t drawn anything in weeks — life has a way of shoving creative things to the margins — and I just wanted to sit with a pencil and not think for a while.
I was sketching something simple. A tree. Nothing ambitious. But about ten minutes in, I realized I’d been pressing too hard. The lines were dark and heavy where they should have been light. And because I was using pencil on paper, there was no undo button. The harder I tried to fix it, the messier it got.
So I just… kept going. Worked around the dark lines. Let the lighter strokes I added afterward do their job beside the heavy ones. And by the time I was done — midnight, quiet house, bad lighting — it actually looked like something. Not perfect. But real.
I don’t know why my brain went to John 1:5, but it did.
“The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
There’s a patience in that verse that I miss when I read it too fast. The light shines — present tense, ongoing. It doesn’t blast the darkness away all at once. It doesn’t demand that the darkness disappear before it starts working. It just… keeps shining. Steady. Persistent. Beside the dark, not waiting for the dark to leave first.
I think I want God to be an eraser. I want Him to undo the heavy, dark lines in my life — the mistakes, the hard seasons, the things I pressed too hard on. But that’s not what John 1:5 describes. The light doesn’t erase the darkness. It shines in it. It works alongside it. And somehow, the final picture is still beautiful — not because the dark lines aren’t there, but because the light showed up and didn’t leave.
Some seasons feel like drawing at midnight with bad lighting and too-heavy lines. You can’t see what it’s becoming. You’re not sure it’s becoming anything.
But the Light keeps shining. It hasn’t stopped. It won’t.
I’m curious: What’s a season in your life that felt like total darkness at the time but — looking back now — you can see where the Light was shining all along? I’d love to hear. Drop a comment below.