The Light In The Darkness

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. — John 1:5Marcus Delaney had everything a man is supposed to want.A Pro Bowl career. A $31 million contract. A wife who loved him better than he deserved. A house that cost more per month than his mother made in a year working doubles at Duke Health, pressing the crease into his church pants on Sunday mornings while he slept.He had everything. And for thirteen seconds after the best catch of any given game — thirteen seconds, which was the longest it ever lasted — it felt like enough.Then the injury happened. The contract restructured. The money moved faster than he understood. The people in the room thinned out. And Marcus Delaney, who had built his entire identity on what he could do on a football field, found himself alone in an apartment in the dark at three in the morning, watching game tape of a man he no longer recognized.He had no idea who he was without the jersey.He had no idea he never had.The Light in the Darkness is the story of what happens when God strips everything away — not to destroy a man, but to finally introduce him to himself. Set against the world of professional football and the quiet faithfulness of an HBCU campus in North Carolina, this novel follows Marcus from the peak of his career through the wreckage of addiction, a broken marriage, and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone worth being.Along the way he will encounter the coach who never stopped praying for him. A wife whose faith held what his pride had broken. A groundskeeper named Raymond who has been tending the ground Marcus walks on for eleven years — and who carries a secret that will reorder everything Marcus thought he knew about himself, his past, and the wound he has been filling with the wrong things his entire life.At its heart this is a story about fathers and sons. About the wounds that absence leaves, and the long, faithful work of God in the margins of lives that don't yet know they're being rebuilt. About what a testimony actually is — not a success story, but what happens when God gets into a mess and does something with it that the mess couldn't do with itself.For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. — Jeremiah 29:11For readers of Courageous, War Room, and The Shack — and for anyone who has ever built their life on something that didn't hold, and wondered if it was too late to build again. Read more