At least three times in my life, I’ve experienced seasons of particularly intense darkness. Two of these seasons were triggered by wrenching changes in circumstance. One fell seemingly without any external cause at all.
I look back on these dark periods with a mixture of dread and awe. Dread because the pain was excruciating, taking me to the very end of myself. Awe because the gifts that God drew from these periods, and the lessons that I learned from them, I would not now trade for anything.
As the nights grow long again, I’ve been reminding myself lately of the gifts of the dark…
The most frightening part of a season of darkness is the feeling that God has left you. I remember the moment it first happened to me. The previous year had been the most spiritually vibrant, God-saturated of my life. I was full of passion and purpose. I’d spent long hours in prayer and encountered God like never before. I’d been hearing the Spirit speak and taking risks to follow.
And then one day I showed up to pray, and heaven’s phone line was dead. I distinctly remember thinking that was what it felt like. It wasn’t like the phone was ringing, unanswered. There wasn’t any static sound of signal interference. It wasn’t that prickly, infuriating silence where you can sense someone breathing on the other end who is simply refusing to talk. The line was dead as if it had been cut in half by scissors. As if there was no connection at all.
I had never even noticed the constant, quiet hum of Presence around me until it abruptly went silent. I panicked. I cried. I screamed. I listened to music and went to church and confessed every sin I could think of, trying to figure out what I had done wrong to drive God away. As weeks turned to months, I began to have trouble even getting out of bed. I was sick with near-despair.
During this twelve-month season of darkness, I heard from God exactly once. About six months into the season, I was sitting in the back row of a sanctuary, reading from the book of Job—the Bible’s ode to despair—when I came upon these words:
“But if I go the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him. But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold” (Job 23:8-10).
I saw the scene play out in front of my eyes as if I was watching a movie. There I was, standing on a hill in the middle of a valley, with land spread out below me. I was turning, turning in every direction, searching for some hint of God. But no matter where I looked, the landscape was empty.
Then I blinked, and there he was: Jesus, standing a foot in front of me. My eyes were passing straight through him. From my position on that hill, I could not see him or sense him at all. But his eyes were fixed on me. And he was smiling.
“He knows the way that you take.” Suddenly, I got it: what would define my fate was not what I saw but Who saw me. I may have lost my bearings, but I was not lost. What mattered most was not what I could find but that I had been found.
The lights did not suddenly come on that day. The season of darkness lingered for some time longer. The pain did not lessen. But what had been broken, permanently, was the paralyzing fear.
I know this now—in this relationship between me and God, I am not anchor. My feeling, my seeing, my understanding, my knowing is not the ground on which love holds. I am seen. I am known. I am found. You are seen. You are known. You are found. You may not know where he is right now. But he knows the way you take. And it’s enough.
