Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

by Barbara Brown Taylor

One of the books on my reading list was a collection of essays called Let There Be Night, including one by a Brit named James Bremner who said he was mightily afraid of the dark as a child. There was no reason for him to be afraid, he says now. He lived in a small village in western Scotland where there were no wild animals or known criminals. But there were also no streetlights or porch lights in his village, which meant that once night fell, the darkness was absolute. Every evening after supper, it was his job to take the family’s empty milk bottles down to the bottom of the driveway so the milkman could swap them out next morning—a chore that put a major dent in his personal history of darkness. The driveway was only about a hundred yards long, but from the house it disappeared into complete blackness almost at once. When James finally balled up the courage to walk into it—running was not an option with glass bottles in his arms—he lived for the moment when he could set them down and race back to the house. The darkness never stopped terrifying him. Every single night it took all the courage he had.