15th February 2021

This stretch has been h    a   r    d.

A serious lack of hugs, connection hindered by rain and cold and patchy internet, even more change and wearying adapting and still with the looming fear of catch or no catch and what will or won’t be.

Fear and anxiety have flowed more than ebbed and the tidal undulations of thoughts and feelings become more of a rollercoaster car on a closed circuit track that has got stuck in a dip.

King writer of words that describe this very journey, David, calls it overwhelmed. Literally to be covered over with darkness. Like a shroud that obscures or the reducing fading vision when you faint; when weariness and need to escape literally overtake and unconscious nightime envelops.

Whatever language you put round it we’ve all felt it.

So back at Christmas time when I read the story of a young girl being overshadowed, something inside of me quickened as I tried to grasp how and why the story of good news began with being described as overshadowed. Enough with the darkness!

And then I found something beautiful. This word was different.

The word for overshadowed was originally written in Greek: episkiazo. And rather than being covered in darkness, it means to envelop in a haze or cloud of brilliancy.

When we are overshadowed by God, rather than cast in darkness we are wrapped around in light.

Not a harsh light (though it may reveal). But there is a softness and a mysteriousness and yet an undeniably realness.

Episkiazo also means to shed influence upon. Or to invest with beyond natural (out of this world) experience.

Miraculous.

A cloud that surrounds you with gold droplets of light that settle on your form and preciously infuse reckless goodness.

When Mary is overshadowed, heaven comes to earth to make a way for earth to be heaven; the waymaker is birthed in her and through her.  Peter, James and John are episkiazoed when they see and hear the bright and shining out of this world reality of who Jesus is for real in this world. It changes them forever and they write of it in books to come…..our eyes have seen it and we didn’t make it up!  They are so transformed that later then when Peter, the one who has been episkiazoed, episkiazoes people who are troubled and sick – and they are no longer sick or troubled. The real world is enveloped in out of this world influence, and everything is different.

When (not if) our hearts are overwhelmed our vision is shrouded; we either can’t see or can only see dark. Sometimes our being gives way and faints without our permission, and sometimes all we want to do is run far away or crawl under a blanket. Right then and there, that’s when he wants to wrap you round with his light itself shadow. Surround you with his haze of hope and brilliancy. Invest and infuse you with his life bringing, life sustaining power. Swaddle you with his affection, and fold you in favour.  

He is so kind that even his shadow is generous.

How can this be?

We often cannot see it. Or understand it. And it doesn’t make sense.

But listen to his messenger(s) (heavenly or otherwise).

Perhaps go up a mountain with friends.

Pray.

Or be influenced by those who have seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears.

But perhaps most importantly. At the first sploshings of whelm. Or the first creeping of dark shadow in your peripheral vision. Or any point from there on in. Your story of saving will begin when you say yes to Light and Truth.

 May it be to me as You have said.