The true story behind The Place of Endless Lights: Part I - Facing my Fears.

Part 1: Facing My Fears.

The Valley

It was just after my 30th birthday that I got diagnosed with chronic fatigue. It was a little bit like running, coffee-fuelled, full-pelt and head-first into a hole. Initially on diagnosis, I was so used to running that my major strategy to overcome this hole was to collapse in the dark, wait a few days, heave myself back into my normal life, and then run, head-first straight back into the hole again. As you can imagine, you end up spending more and more time in the hole. Eventually it becomes a new kind of normal. And there I was, in concrete terms, spending most of my days in bed, only getting up to pretend some normal for my children, and absolutely desperate to run again.

The truth was I’d been running for years.

It was only in the hole that I looked at my life and began to count the losses of the previous decade. Where was peace? Had it dribbled off the edges?

Where was listening to the voice of Jesus in all this running?

Did I really want to live my life with an engine of fear?

This is Aria’s story in my book. She is a runner. She has been taught by those around her that the right response to fear, is to turn tail, and never stop running. But she longs to stop. To find the place where running ends.

That was my dream too. To find a place where I could be content, connected. If only I could work hard enough and run far enough, I would reach that place, I thought. The joy of knowing Jesus was pleased and I had done enough. Permission to stop. I was like a kid forever hanging on for the holidays that never arrived.

But now, with chronic fatigue, my strategy of running was stopped. Broken. Running revealed as pointless.

In the hole, I was on my own. Faced finally and terribly by the things I had been running from. It took a while to own it. I didn’t want to admit I was scared. I didn’t want to admit that partly, I’d been running from myself.

Those early days of illness were livid with emotions. I swung between anxiety and depression, exhausted by attempting to get better, desperate for a cure, or collapsing into deep dark, convinced there was no way out.

I discovered that I was terrified. Terrified that this was my fault. And underneath it lurked an older terror: I was nothing without producing something. Even scarier, the insidious conviction that God didn’t really have good things for me, that he was a harsh task master, that all he wanted from me was to do stuff for him. Deep down, one of the shocking thoughts was that the harder and more painful it was for me, the more valuable it was to God. These weren’t things I said, but they showed up in my feelings and in my life.

In the story of the prodigal son in the Bible, I was like the older brother. He appears at the end of the story and shouts at the Father for being kind to his little brother who has returned from a big rebellion. “Hey! Where’s my party? Where’s your affection for me? Why can’t I have the ring and the attention?”

The Father looks at the older brother with love.

“You are always with me, and everything I have is yours,” he says.

The older brother has been there the whole time - but he doesn’t seem to have been inside the house! No wonder he is cross. He’s been treating himself like a servant through the entirety of his brother’s rebellion.

(Full story in Luke 15.)

This was me. No dramatic walk away from God, but in my heart, a growing conviction that God wanted more from me than I could give, and that I was a disappointment. Mingled with my own angry disappointments because nothing I did seemed to be bearing much fruit. The Father was throwing feasts for other people, but where was mine? After “all these years I’d been slaving” for him. This was the fear snapping at my heels. That I was not enough. That God was not good.

In the Place of Endless Lights, Aria’s fears follow her in the voices of the tunnellers: creepy, long-clawed creatures who have emerged from the underground places and have now taken up residence in the open in her town. This was life for me when I got sick. The voices were no longer underground, they were out in the open.

In the book, the tunneller's weapon is to fan fear into such overwhelming proportions that people fall asleep. Using fantastical googles they are able to see people’s fears and play on them with their constant questions and what ifs. The people listening are so terrified they become frozen into complete inaction. A kind of frozen sleep. And this too was based on my experience, fears that had plagued me for years seemed to being megaphone-shouted at me everywhere I turned. I was trapped in a cycle of running. Exhausted but unable to rest for fear of what awaited me in the dark.

“There was no safe place.”

But this, of course, for anyone who knows him, was when Jesus showed up. In the hole.

In the story, Aria meets the Trailmaker, and though she hears the offer of a “Place of Endless Lights”, she is full of cynism and fear. She’s been disappointed before.

And this was me too! ‘Oh yes Jesus, I’ve heard of your kindness and your love. I’ve sung about them for years. Encountered them in brief. But now I am unravelled, undone and fragile in the pit of my life, and I am not so sure.’

“There is no safe place.”

But the gravity of the situation sometimes makes us desperate enough to reconsider our positions, doesn’t it? Eventually Aria is convinced. She is desperate. She can not outrun her fear so she abandons her escape plans, and sets her sights on The Place of Endless Lights. But how does she get there?

About a year into my illness, I too was finally convinced I would have to face this stuff. Ready at last to “learn the lessons” of the season and find what Jesus had for me here.

I remember turning up to my first counselling session, wrapped up in a massive scarf and unnecessarily loaded up with bags and walking straight into the biggest therapy cliche. I told the counsellor that I didn’t really need counselling, I just wanted to tie up the learning from my illness. I realised it was productive and useful and I was totally fine with it. Um! No!

Through counselling and learning to pray a whole new way, I realised that the hole, was actually a valley. It was not a place to learn lessons. It was not like the mountain where heaven invades earth and we can touch eternity with our fingers. It was not like the market place where we share and be together and offer what we have to the world.

This was a new kind of place. A place of hiddenness and loneliness. A place of quiet that stretched for days and days and days. A world of very small things. But Jesus made us a home, even in that shadowed purple valley. We set up a tent, and he met with me there.

In the story this is Aria’s experience with the Trailmaker. He walks with her. He loves her. He waits for her. And then, eventually, he reveals the secret about the place she is searching for.

But for that, you’ll have to read the book!

The image of endless lights is one that actually came from my honeymoon. Our very expensive and beautiful honeymoon was, in my head, to be the pinnacle of all my romantic dreams. No matter how many kind friends tried to warn me that sometimes honeymoons can feel a little bit pressured, I carried an unconscious belief that I would never be more beautiful than for those two blissful weeks, and that our brand-new, shiny marriage would lead me, naturally and without effort, to some kind of spiritual and emotional height. I would stand atop that cloud and I would radiate joy and happy-ever-after.

Yeah, so that didn’t happen. And it took me years to get over it.

It wasn’t even a car crash of a holiday, it was just so disappointingly normal.

It turned out that I took myself into that beautiful place of beaches and ever-lasting blue skies and I just kind of ruined it.

But then came a kind day, when Jesus took my back to my honeymoon memories, that I had sort of folded away in my drawer of crashing disappointments, and he showed me all the lights. Physical lights. The lights of the fireflies on the night we argued in the car. The lights on the beach across the water when we accidentally spent a crazy amount of money on dinner because we didn’t know the exchange rate. The fireworks that were so beautiful they made me cry.

“I was there,” Jesus whispered. “I was in the lights.”

And genuinely, in that one conversation, my honeymoon was redeemed. I had a new way of seeing the story. And, even more amazingly, a new way of walking through disappointments was born.

I learnt that Jesus could speak his life into my story and show me, not a silver lining, but a resurrection.

This is an important differentiation. My illness was not a productive and useful experience. Darkness is never something we celebrate. But we are grateful for our time in the darkness, because we see the lights there. We are grateful for being allowed to participate in death, because it is where we encounter resurrection.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

2 Corinthians 7:12

And so it was, that a resurrection happened in my life. Jesus entered the darkness of my valley, and so, inevitably, lit it up.

Jesus revealed himself to me in that valley, as once more the source of everything I ever wanted.

He taught me to slow down. To find a way of praying that was quiet enough for a brain that doesn’t work. He showed me that he is big enough to make a small life enough: that he could give me the whole world in a garden.

He reminded me that he was always there. In the yawning silence, in the seeming absence. Even when he is saying absolutely nothing and I am screaming into his face to hear him say something, anything. Even then he stays.

These are the things Aria learns too. She realises the Trailmaker is never so far away as he may seem. That he is good no matter what. And that she too can go to the Place of Endless Lights.

And that is where my book began. In my deep and lonely valley, with only the voice of Jesus for respite from the silence and my own fears. A story was growing. A story of hope. And I began to trace the words he had written across my life. And I wrote it down.

You can preorder it here.

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Katy x