I Met God in the Light

A lot of people meet God in the dark.
That’s what I always heard, anyway — that rock bottom is holy ground. That when everything falls apart, when the lights go out and the noise dies down, that's where He shows up. The stories I grew up around were drenched in crisis: the addict who found God in the back of an ambulance, the woman who cried out to God from her bathroom floor, the man who went to prison and came out with a Bible in his hands and fire in his heart.

I don’t question any of it. I know He’s there, in the dark. I believe in the kind of grace that reaches down into the pit. But for me — that’s not where I found Him.

I found God in the light.

And at first, I didn’t trust it.

Because my pain taught me to brace for impact, not to breathe. Because I’d spent so many years unlearning toxic religion that when I started to feel peace again, it almost felt like betrayal. I didn’t know I was allowed to feel safe and still be in the presence of the Divine. I didn’t know I could feel steady without striving.

But then the hollow season ended — slowly, not dramatically. Not with a bang, but with a quiet softening I didn’t even recognize at first. I started breathing more deeply. I started hearing God not in the thunder, but in the pause between moments. I started noticing the warmth on my skin when the sun rose through the blinds. And I started to believe that maybe… just maybe… I wasn’t alone anymore.

Motherhood had broken me open. Not in the metaphorical way people like to romanticize, but in the very real way that sleep deprivation and postpartum depression and solo parenting a two-year-old would rearrange every part of you. And somewhere in the in-between of nurturing him and trying to survive myself, I realized I had changed. Not because I had figured everything out. But because I had stopped running from the light.

It was in the ordinary days that I started to feel God again. Not just believe in Him — actually feel Him. There was no altar. No revival. Just me in a sunlit room folding toddler laundry while my son laughed at a cartoon. And for the first time in what felt like years, I realized I wasn’t panicking. I wasn’t bracing for the next wave of grief. I wasn’t pretending to be okay. I actually was okay.

There was no big dramatic shift — just the slow rebuilding of a soul. A remembering. A re-rooting. A restoration.

It didn’t look like what I thought it would. There wasn’t a return to the girl I used to be, or a recovery of dreams I once lost. And the things I mourned — relationships, old versions of myself, hopes that unraveled — they didn’t come back the way I wanted them to. But God did give something back. Not replicas. Not replacements. Something deeper.

He gave me peace.
He gave me softness.
He gave me myself — not the old self, but a more honest one. One who doesn’t hustle for worthiness. One who knows when to rest. One who sees light and doesn’t flinch anymore.

It’s strange — I always thought my redemption would come after a fall. But instead, it came after the silence. After the slow healing. After the realization that maybe I wasn’t made for the mountaintop moment, but for the gentle, quiet mornings where I choose to stay and let the light in.

So no, I didn’t meet God in the dark.
I met Him in the light.
And over time, I realized it wasn’t just light I had found — it was Jesus. Gentle. Present. Nothing like the versions I had been warned about.

Maybe that’s why I hold everything differently now.
Maybe that’s why I write the way I do — why I believe softness is sacred, why I don’t need thunder to believe in miracles anymore.

I know there’s holiness in the hollow.
But there’s holiness in the healing, too.
And in the room where your son is giggling, and the sink is full of dishes, and your heart is finally steady.

The dark didn’t bring me to God.
The light did.

And that changed everything.