Loved Back to Light
Photo by Gernot Fi on Unsplash
An Essay by Ashlyn Mckayla Ohm
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On the fringes of my land, a miracle is unfolding: the daffodils are blooming.
Beneath the surly scowl of winter, the papery bulbs languish underground, frozen and forgettable. But with the first kiss of warmth to the earth, the flowers emerge, braving the false starts of spring and the last thrusts of winter, shaking out their skirts in the hues of sunlight.
Because the daffodils bloom near my birthday, I’ve always associated their rebirth with my own leap into life. And in recent years, they’ve come to symbolize my spiritual renascence as well. You see, like these bulbs that dwindle in darkness, I too, early in my life, found myself going underground.
Most people saw only the green leaves and showy flowers of my outward accomplishments: straight-A student, emerging writer, dutiful Christian girl. What they didn’t see was that my mind, my best friend in my academic and creative pursuits, was also my worst enemy. There are words that try to encapsulate this kind of suffering–words like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive. But no clinical terms can capture the way my mind buried me alive with my deepest fears, trapping me in a continuously shrinking cave. The harder I struggled to escape, the smaller and darker and more terrifying the cave became. I was helpless to respond to my family and friends, begging me to return above-ground: Please come back to us! We love you. Where are you?
A question I couldn’t even answer myself.
To make matters worse, my torment was often increased by the wagging fingers of well-meaning but formulaic Christians who lectured that I could resurrect myself if only I’d pray more, trust deeper, or generally try harder. As a result, I was convinced that an angry God viewed my devastation as disobedience.
But in the years since then, I’ve realized that as deeply shameful as my story felt at the time, it is far from an anomaly, even (and especially) among Christ-followers. Perhaps it’s familiar to you as well. Maybe you have also been buried in anxiety or depression or obsession. Or perhaps you’ve gone underground for a different reason; there are many tender ways our minds and spirits can fracture. But whatever your situation, I’m holding out a reminder for you today. No lesson, no lecture, just a little bit of light.
Our God is not a gravedigger; He is instead a gardener.
As the Tender of our souls, He knows that underground is a scary, lonely, agonizing place to be. Yet the soil of suffering is very good for growing. When God allows our souls to be planted in darkened dirt, it’s not because He’s tired of tolerating us or because He’s vengefully hoping we’ll learn some cosmic lesson. Instead, as dissonant as this truth feels, He’s doing it out of love. In our darkest seasons, we can hear the Savior’s heartbeat better than ever before because even in our underground, we are never alone.
I’m reminded again of the daffodil bulbs. I always knew that their “death” below the dirt is actually a launching into greater life. But I recently learned that a yet greater miracle hovers over the sleeping seeds: even underground, bulbs are not cut off from the light. Cued by special receptors in their roots, the bulbs can “see” the light received by the soil around them, a knowledge that enables them not only to survive the winter but also, ultimately, to find their way back to the springtime sun.
And that, dear friend, is the hope for us today.
You see, we serve a God who is not afraid to go underground. Wherever we are–in the darkest shadows of our mind, the deepest dirt of our fears, or the coldest corners of loneliness–His light loves us too much to stay behind. Just look at Jesus Himself, the Light of the World, the perfect Gardener, who sank His fingers into the soil of our suffering. He underwent unimaginable mental and spiritual anguish, burying Himself not only in the very darkest depths of our fear and pain but also in the cold heart of a stone-hewn tomb.
But He didn’t stay underground.
With the triumph of the first bloom of spring, He rose from the shadows and returned to the world He so loves, scattering hope like wildflowers across our hearts. And it’s in his resurrection that we find the hope for our own.
That’s where my own story began to turn around. When I was locked underground, the Light found me. He embraced me, sang over me, reached for me with a love that even my fear-fractured mind couldn’t mistake. And there, at the buried end of my strength, I could finally see the way back to the sunlight. Not because I could reverse my own death but because the grave-destroying Gardener had rooted me in His life.
And this is His gentle invitation to us all. He doesn’t demand that we resurrect ourselves by carrying more weight or conjuring better emotions or striving with greater diligence. Instead, He simply asks that we turn toward His light and follow the glimmer of that grace back toward life. And yes, like all green gardening, this resurrection rhythm requires the slow seeds of patience and trust and daily deep breaths. But even in our scars and stumbles and our occasional sinking back into the soil, we hold a promise like the glowing heart of hope itself: that the darkness cannot claim us, that the Gardener will never leave us, that we are growing into His light like the bursting of the blooms.
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A worshiper of the Creator and a wanderer of creation, Ashlyn McKayla Ohm is the author of the contemporary fiction Climbing Higher trilogy as well as devotional and poetry collections. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in Clayjar Review, Truly Co., Proverbs 31, Calla Press, and Heart of Flesh. If she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably hiking, birdwatching, or otherwise getting lost in the woods. Follow Ashlyn’s adventures at : wordsfromthewilderness.substack.com.
