Epiphany

I'm sure that the campus of my prep school is covered in ice and snow at this time, the same way it was on January 6, 1984. That was what I guess I'd call "First Epiphany" or "The Day God and Angels and Archangels and All the Company of Heaven" intervened to stop me from checking out. I was fortunate to have had enough of a life force within me that even in one of the darkest hours, I had enough light to ask someone to help me.
I didn't fully understand God's role in that moment until a couple of years ago when I was in church for the Epiphany. My mentor was preaching, and she noted in her sermon that the three wise men set out to find this new king, this child in Bethlehem, without a compass, a map, or a GPS. Just a star and a willingness to keep following the path of this light. Meanwhile, King Herod was ordering up a mass slaughter of children in hopes of eliminating a threat. Herod, as she pointed out, was afraid and preferred to remain in darkness. She posed the question, "Are we going to be like Herod?" and I remember that tears began welling up in my eyes. The question, after the set up, reminded me of what I had gone through as a teen-ager. Not that I was threatened and trying to kill off a rival. But the addiction to darkness, and to death and to fear: that all rang true for my inner troubled teen.
And so I had what I'll name "Second Epiphany" as I reflected more on her sermon. I walked down to the park near my house, and started processing my thoughts on paper. It was then that it came to me how very present God had been in the classroom with me and the school chaplain at that moment. And not just God, but all the means at God's disposal to keep me put in the chair, so that I didn't do something permanently crazy. And from that I reached the conclusion that what had really gone down that morning in 1984 was the evidence that the light can, and will, triumph over the dark. And, as I noted in this free-form written processing, the journey that I find myself on now won't allow me to reverse course. Thanks be to God!
For this Epiphany, my hope for all of you reading is that you will never allow your light to be snuffed out in the belief that darkness is somehow better. It isn't.
What made the wise men so wise, in my opinion, was that they trusted and followed a star, and they never traveled back along that same road by Herod's place. So let's all follow that example. If your steps take you backward, don't retrace that path. And may you have an epiphany on Epiphany.