Treasures of Darkness

One of the girls on my floor invited me to come with her to another dorm last night for one installment of a weekly series called "Equipping Your Prayer Life." The RD who leads the sessions opened with this verse, which he'd read that morning in his daily devotions:

I will go before you
     and level the mountains,
I will break in pieces the doors of bronze
     and cut through the bars of iron,
I will give you the treasures of darkness
     and riches hidden in secret places,
so that you may know that it is I, the LORD,
     the God of Israel, who call you by your name.

                            Isaiah 45:2-3 (NRSV)

Before I left for college I worked at a resale store. Probably my favorite thing in that resale store was a cardboard box that one of the workers used to keep on the shelves behind her counter in the back. Scrawled on the side of box in black Sharpie were the words "treasures of darkness."

I have no idea who wrote that on the box or why that person wrote it on that particular box, but there it was. I stopped by the treasures of darkness box almost every time I worked, since I needed to get something out of it. Which begs the question: what was in the box?

Answer: rags.

I will give you the treasures of darkness
     and riches hidden in secret places.

Thanks, but no thanks. I used to go to the treasures of darkness box to grab a rag before I went to clean the bathrooms after we closed the store for the night. I think I can do without any more treasures of darkness.

Riches tucked away in secret places sound good to us – or even "hidden treasures," as another translation renders the words "treasures of darkness." We don't expect to open the lid of the treasure chest and find a pile of worn, stained, bathroom-cleaning rags. If that's what treasures of darkness are, most of us would probably pass.

And I know that Isaiah probably didn't have rags in mind when he spoke of treasures of darkness all those years ago, but I find the connection intriguing all the same. Maybe I shouldn't pass up on those old rags so quickly. Maybe they really are a treasure in a way, a treasure hidden in the darkness because we definitely don't expect them to be a treasure. Maybe the purpose they serve – the purpose they can only serve when hands like mine take hold of them – can be a treasure in itself.

I don't know what happened to the treasures of darkness box. It vanished after the back room was cleaned out one day and the rags were relocated to some bins below another counter. I missed that box. It always made me smile when I saw it, just because I thought it was kind of funny that the rags were kept in a box that said "treasures of darkness."

Maybe there was a little more to that than I used to think.