I recently had a video posted to my facebook wall that let darkness back into my soul, a kind of darkness that I haven't experienced in a long time. The video was of a child(or better called a baby) about 2 years old playing outside in some Asian country when a man just walks up to the poor thing and starts stomping on the child and beating the child, this last for over 2 minutes with passers by just walking past and doing nothing. This child was being killed by this evil individual and no one does anything. After a few minutes someone finally chases the guy off and the child is rushed to the hospital where I am imagining it died (I don't see how it could have survived the beating).
This disturbing video brought me to tears and made me wish I could have been there to kill the guy who did it and to help save the child. Worse yet I could not get the scene out of my mind and it kept repeating itself over and over again in my mind. An innocent child doing what children do comes into contact with something so evil that just shatters the beauty and promise of that child. I thought at first it disturbed me most because of the fact that I have an Asian wife and my children are half Asian and the parallels with my own children. Now that there is some distance between myself and the emotions I was feeling I found the real reason the darkness would not leave me.
Some years ago I was a Missionary and me and the another Missionary were out walking in a neighborhood at dusk when we came across a stray puppy. It was a little black lab puppy so we picked it up and took it to the closest couple of homes asking if it was their dog. After a few houses we found the house it belonged to and we left it (or so we thought) it kept following us. No matter how hard we tried it wouldn't return home and it had caught up to us about a quarter of a mile away from the home so we decided to start walking it back. After about 5 minutes of walking when a jacked up beater truck came barreling out way. The truck nearly hit me and my companion we managed to get out of the way but the little puppy did not. It gasped for breath, its broken body shattered as it gasped to breath its last breaths, this once beautiful creature reduced to nothing but a broken shell dead on the concrete. As we crowded in to look at it in shock the driver hopped out of his car reeking of alcohol and worried that he had hit someone. We pulled the now dead puppy to the side of the road and went and told the owners.
That scene was a domino that tripped a series of others events that would lead to my eventual for lack of a better description psychotic break, a break caused by the depths of depression. Something about being an Missionary trying to help people escape from evil, and having something so pure and beautiful as a puppy just destroyed by someones evil actions just wrecked all naivety I had and taught me how truly evil the world is that we live in. It is this dark finger that crept back in after watching the video, the evil and darkness that pulled me back to the mindset I had clawed myself out of all those years earlier.
It was in the suffering and pain I was feeling that I found something, something I would never have found otherwise. I won't go into to much of particulars about it but I was with my family and still feeling the brunt of the feelings I had from the video. The day before I had watched a documentary at my job about quantum physics/ mechanics and we went to watch Kung Fu Panda III( I know how silly that sounds)at the theater. It was there that it happened in pondering about the three things combined in that theater it happened. In a moment of clarity it was as if the veil was pushed back and I saw the threads of the universe and how they were all connected and how God factors into all of it. I found tears flowing down my cheek now this time for a different reason, this time because of the beauty of what I saw the hands of God, the purpose in full, I was taught things which I will not write here, nor am I sure that I could explain them in a way that they would make sense to anyone else.
I write this not to teach of the things I saw but of the how it came about, and how I had to fight with that evil, inner darkness, and torment to lead me to that moment to that plane of conscientiousness in which I learned things that will forever changed my life. I know everyone experiences the darkness, the voices which don't leave you alone in the silence. As me those of you going through it would wonder why me? why must I endure these things? Maybe your not just enduring these things your just experiencing such darkness because of the brightness of the clarity that follows.
