The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee

The heaviest things I deal with are almost never the public ones.

That surprises people. They assume the man with the story everybody knows is carrying the most, and sometimes he is, and often he is not, because a thing everybody knows has been out in the air for years and air does something to a thing.

The heaviest things are the ones with no audience.

A man carries something nobody has ever heard. There is no scandal, nothing came of it, nobody was harmed in a way that shows, and there is no scenario in which it ever comes out. He could carry it to the end and nobody would ever know.

And because there is no audience, there is no natural end to it. Nothing forces it into daylight. It simply runs, quietly, for decades, and gets heavier by a small amount every year.

There is a psalm about hiding in the dark that is the most useful thing I know for that man.

He tries the dark and reports back

Here is the passage.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. (Psalm 139:11-12, King James Version)

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me. He is describing an attempt. He tried it, or considered it seriously enough to write it down.

And the report back is not a threat. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee. It is a statement about optics rather than about surveillance: the difference between the two, which is the whole basis of hiding, does not exist at that end.

Now, that sentence can land two ways depending on what a person expects to happen when they are seen. If they expect a verdict, it is terrifying. If they have read the rest of the psalm, it is the opposite.

Because the psalm does not end with him running. It ends with him asking to be searched.

You are not hidden, and the psalm treats that as safety rather than as exposure. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. It is the same Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:10 searching all things, even the deep things of God, who is described as searching rather than as catching anybody.

Light is where the fellowship is

There is a sentence in John's letter that puts light and company in the same clause, which is not the arrangement most people assume.

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7)

Notice what walking in the light produces. Not exposure. Fellowship one with another.

Everybody expects light to mean being found out and therefore being alone. John says the opposite: light is where the company is, and the cleansing is in the same sentence as the company.

Which explains something about a private thing that most people discover only by accident. It is not the shame that isolates a person. It is the hiding. The thing itself has no power to remove anybody from a room; the arrangement built around it does that, slowly, over years.

You are being walked toward company rather than toward exposure. 1 John 1:7 says walking in the light produces fellowship one with another. It is the Spirit of God, Ephesians 4:3 keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, who makes the room a person is afraid of into the place the fellowship is.

And if what you have been carrying privately has begun to weigh more than one person can hold, say it out loud to somebody: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A thing with no audience gets heavier by design, and that is exactly why it is worth saying out loud once to a person who is safe.

What James prescribes and what it is for

There is a verse about telling another person, and it is worth reading for what it is aimed at.

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. (James 5:16)

That ye may be healed. It is prescribed for healing rather than for forgiveness, and the difference matters enormously here.

Forgiveness is settled between two parties in 1 John 1:9 and there is no audience in that verse at all. So nobody has to tell a person in order to be forgiven, and I have said that plainly elsewhere on this site and I will not water it down.

But healing, meaning the slow business of a thing losing its grip on a life, very often needs a person in the room, and James says so. He is describing the mechanism rather than adding a condition.

And notice the shape: one to another, mutually, with praying attached. It is not a report to an authority. It is two people who both have something.

You have forgiveness settled without an audience and healing described as needing one. 1 John 1:9 completes the forgiving with two parties and James 5:16 attaches healing to telling, and it is His Spirit, Titus 3:5 named in the washing of regeneration, who does the cleansing that neither conversation accomplishes.

Where the boldness is located

And there is one verse about approach that a man with a private thing needs more than most.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)

Come boldly. And it is worth reading what that boldness is grounded in, which is the verse just before it: a High Priest who has been through what we are in and is not a stranger to it.

So the confidence is not confidence in your own record. It is confidence about who is receiving, and those two are completely different things.

The verse just before that one says all things are naked and opened unto His eyes, and then this verse says come boldly. The New Testament puts those two side by side deliberately: being fully known and being able to walk in are in consecutive sentences.

You are able to come boldly precisely because nothing is hidden. Hebrews 4:13 says all things are naked and opened and Hebrews 4:16 says come boldly in consecutive breaths. It is the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 2:18 by whom we both have access unto the Father, who is named as that access.