Dark and Light

Today I had lunch with three friends. We do it every week. Its been something we've done for over a year now and I still have a few things to admit to myself.
We started this new Bible study together and I had to spend this morning reflecting on my own story about how I became a Christian. I found an old picture of me from my 9th grade year. Its a horrible picture of me and everyone else, but I keep it around because its one of the few photos I have from that period that caught me. You can see my emptiness. I stared into that picture this morning and remembered.
This experience has clouded me all day. Even when I went to lunch and shared a brief of my story to (at least) two girls who already know many details of my past, I still got sick to my stomach as I tried to relate the brief synopsis of my journey. And I knew this was coming. He told me weeks ago that this new transformation was going to have a new element to it. I would turn around and face the darkness. I would have to run my mind back through it. I would have to remember it, to the very depths of my soul.
This revelation has scared me more than anything has scared me in a very long time. This morning was a piece of that.
This is my take on all of this:
For years I lived in the darkness. I lived there and drank it until I became it and saw only it ever. I felt nothing. I lived for nothing. I was dead and hollow and sub-human. "I was a brute beast before you". But then I felt. I felt something that has never left me. From that moment, I turned and saw light. I did not run to it at first, but then, I began to run to it. Eventually, as I ran more and more I began to see more and more light and less and less darkness. I did not always want the light. The darkness, even though I despised it, was familiar and a strange comfort to me. In darkness, i knew who I was. No secrets. But I did not know what I would look like in the light. So there would be moments when I would stop running and just stand there and feel the darkness and let it comfort and haunt me. But then I learned to run faster, and now as I run, i run only in light. i see only light. But the darkness has not left me. I remains always at my back. i feel it always. i know it is there. What was done cannot be undone and so it lives on. My choices remain frozen forever in time and no amount of light will undo them. So here I am, in light, but not free of darkness.
So until now, i have contented myself with this. I understand that even the most powerful forgiveness will not undo consequences. I figure that this remnant of my past is my burden to bear forever. My reasoning has pacified my situation, and I have not suspected or expected and new stage of healing. But I was wrong.
Now i am in it. A wrecking ball of change. God has delivered His message: There is another level of healing". "But God", I say, "Even you in all your power do not come and erase the choices you allow us to make through free will. You gave us this will, even if we use it to destroy ourselves. So how can you say to me that there is more healing? You will not obliterate the chaos of my own making. You will not stop the haunting of what was, because it is what it is. You allow time its memory. You will not erase the darkness."
"No." He said. "I will turn it into light."
My deserts will be gardens.
But I don't believe any of this, because all I remember is sand. There is not one flower that exists in that place I ran from. But even when I tell God that I remember no flowers, He only instructs me to turn around and return to the desert to see what He will do there.
(Even as i type this, I feel my own tears because in my lowest gut I know that this is true.)
I have to go back there. I have to remember. I have to go back.
Oh God, why do ask the impossible of me!
I cannot go back to somewhere that I have worked so hard to run from. I have not even looked over my shoulder in years. Help me forget the darkness. Wipe it from my memory, but don't ask me to remember. Don't take me there where there is nothing but sand. To remember would be to bleed with such hurt, that I would surely die and suppress all those who would try to comfort me.
On top of all of this, it impossible for darkness to be light. The existence of one is the absence of another. The do not coexist. They fight each other for existence. This is the reality that I have lived in for years. I run from one because I cannot mix them. I fight them dually. So how can this be?
"Darkness is not dark to me, and night shines light the day."