Winter Solstice

Although the changes may be gradual, you can quickly find yourself in darkness not knowing how exactly you got there

excerpted from Turning of Days (Moody Publishers, 2021)


“The day is yours, and yours also the night; you established the moon and the sun. It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter.” (Psalm 74:16–17)

Winter is upon us now. We’re well past the killing frost, and the calendar tells me the season has changed, though mostly I know it’s winter because of the darkness. To be fair, it’s a darkness that’s been coming due since midsummer when the sun sat high and proud in the sky, and the light continued on and on and on. Forget equal time; give us the sun and only the sun and let us worship under it. We’ve been paying our tithes ever since, giving a minute here and a minute there; the loss so incremental we hardly noticed.

By autumn, we welcomed the earlier evenings as good for bonfires and quiet nights at home. And if we’re honest, we were exhausted by summer’s exuberance; the darkness settled us. But each day, more daylight slipped away. Each day, the night grew longer. We’d go to sleep in darkness and wake in the same. So that by the time the winter solstice came—that day when the earth’s poles are tilted farthest from the sun—the difference between high summer and dark winter is the loss of over five hours of light.

No wonder you feel it in your bones. No wonder you know that winter has come.

I remember my dad talking of the gathering darkness with a sense of both awe and sadness. “The shortest day of the year is coming,” he’d say as if it were his duty to warn us. For him, the loss of daylight meant the loss of working hours and a certain despair settling over the earth. It wasn’t the cold so much as the gloom that hung over the countryside, all gray and heaviness. We could only count on 160 days of sun per year (well below the national average of 205) and winter felt like a thief oppressing the poor. The landscape compounded things, too. If you lived higher up in the mountains, you’d do well enough, but those who sat in the hollows and valleys wouldn’t see the sun until it passed over the hills, sunup and sundown calculated by the geography that surrounded them.

Here in Virginia, we’re more in line with the national average of sunny days, but winter’s shadows still unnerve me. A kind of sheltering instinct kicks in; I withdraw and am become less willing to venture out. I feel sleepier, and with the earth, I find myself shutting down. There are biological reasons, of course. The loss of light affects the body’s natural circadian rhythm, that internal clock that’s synchronized to the earth’s revolutions and tells you when to wake and when to sleep. And although the changes are gradual, you can quickly find yourself in darkness not knowing how exactly you got there

. In these moments, I find it hard to remember the light, and I begin to wonder if I imagined it all. I wonder if lightness, sun, warmth, and freedom were all in my head, a midsummer’s dream.

Of course, there are ways to cope, as our friends further north can testify. The Danes have their hygge and the Dutch their gezelligheid, and the rest of us make do with climate control, interior lighting, and a stable food supply. We find solace in small comforts: a hot drink, candles, woolen socks, blankets, and books. But even our modern conveniences and hermetically sealed lives can’t keep out the darkness. And before long, what we once welcomed as rest can become a kind of numbness; our seclusion, isolation; and the quietness, an echoing silence.

Genesis tells us that when the Creator first created that “darkness was over the surface of the deep,” and all I can imagine is a cold, muddy, winter’s night when nothing grows. But then, the Creator speaks, and light breaks through; and with the light comes sky and clouds, solid ground and seas, plants and animals, abundance and life. He separates the light and darkness and calls it morning and evening and puts sun, moon, and stars in the sky. But here’s something I don’t understand: God creates light, but He doesn’t obliterate darkness. God creates brings light but lets the darkness stay.

Now I can tell you all the reasons why darkness is a good thing, how it allows for cycles of rest and dormancy, how it establishes day and night and helps us keep time. I can tell you how our bodies are set to its changes. I can tell you that certain things require darkness, that only certain things can be learned there. I can tell you that the stars shine brightest against a frozen winter sky, but this is all cold comfort when the nights are long and lonely.

So instead, I will tell you this: The Lord of Creation owns both the light and the darkness. He is Lord of both summer and winter, of good times and bad. To Him, day and night are alike. He has no circadian rhythm.

And because the Creator rules over the darkness, He can’t be overruled by yours.

Because He rules over darkness, He can enter into your night and be unshaken. Because He rules over darkness, He can make it “his covering, his canopy around him” and be completely unharmed. So that while you wait for the days to lengthen, while you wait for the season to turn, while you wait for the dawn, the Lord of both light and dark can meet you there.

Until one day when this same God—the One who sits in the gathering darkness with you—vanquishes darkness forever. Because as much as Genesis tells us of a God who made the light and tames the darkness, Revelation tells us of a God who extinguishes it altogether. And on that day, when earth and heaven finally align, night will be no more and winter’s chill nothing but memory.

Scripture: Genesis 1:2–5; 2 Samuel 22; Psalm 74:16–23; Psalm 104:19–20; 2 Chronicles 6:1; Isaiah 45:2–3; 7–8; Daniel 2:22; Micah 7:8; Romans 8:35–39; Revelation 21:22; 22:5