This week I’ve circled back around to my first language love, Finnish. Kaamos is, literally, ‘darkness’, but it actually refers to polar night in the north, when you don’t see the sun for months on end, and encompasses in many ways the depression that can and often does result from that lack of light.
It seemed an appropriate word for the part of the year where it’s started getting darker and colder and when, while it’s not as extreme as it is with polar night, we still feel that same depression.
And of course, you could argue that the world itself is currently in a form of polar night. Wars and refugees and viruses and violence…bigotry and corruption and injustices and hatred. These things are always going on in some form, but right now, in this time, there seems to be more than normal. Right now, in this time…it seems like it won’t ever end, like the sun will never return.
But it will. To quote an author I like (Brandon Sanderson), “This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth.”
Jesus never promised us life would be easy or that every day would be sunshine, but he did promise us it would be worth it and that there will be sunshine again. Even kaamos does not last forever. Even polar night has its end.
