Dark night to sole delight

I’ve only ever needed one of these experiences to know the reality of God—and, when all is said and done, that’s all that matters.

It was July 2004. I was all alone, and had taken my teary lament to my sponsor, on a chilly night on the foreshore. I was forlorn. And for some reason, he challenged me, but not in a damaging way. It was one of those times where I couldn’t have been much lower, but I was in a safe lament—despairingly sorrowful, but by no means without hope. Held, as it were, by God.

I returned home and just knew I had to warm up. I was shivering. I ran a bath and soaked in the warmest water I could handle. Dripping wet, without a care, probably a quick dry off, but still a little wet, I climbed into bed—and just sobbed. I didn’t have my daughters with me, I relived the fact that I’d lost everything dear to me, and I called out to God in a teary rendition of a Psalm 6 prayer—“I am worn out from my groaning, Lord, all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.”

I don’t recall falling asleep, because I was so exhausted; I could have died and I wouldn’t have cared. I do know that my pillow was sodden from my crying; I had no thought for the discomfort of that cold surface upon my face.

I lived in a townhouse. The weirdest thing happened during the night. I had no awareness of this, but in the morning, I woke up in the bed downstairs, and something had happened.

Almost as if God had answered my prayer of lament, somehow in the darkness of the darkest night of my soul, I was raised by the rays of light that shone through in the morning. The Son’s radiance had revived me, and I saw that morning had indeed broken, literally and figuratively.

Broken was the grip that the darkness had over me.

Suddenly, over one night, God showed me the pattern of resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection is the pattern that we’re given passage to emulate, but we must first be prepared to take God to our hell with us—to seek the Lord’s help there in the miry bog of our sorrowful despairing; a place we ordinarily think is both inconceivable and no place we could coalesce with God.

This experience taught me something cogently salient:

Seek God with all your heart in your experience of dark night
and discover God present with you as your sole delight.

This is not to say any of this is easy, but God has a way of showing up when things are hardest to remind us that we’re never alone!

And life didn’t miraculously get better. My dark night situation didn’t change. But it made a huge difference to me to know God was there with me IN IT. Just as it makes a huge difference to know, even now, that when my soul darkens like night, morning is never too far away.

Photo by Elliott Engelmann on Unsplash