Emerging from the Dark Night

It was only a few days into my late July visit to family in New Zealand that I walked our granddaughter to school. After getting her settled in her classroom, I continued down the street to a coffee shop. I know, surprise, surprise. I feel at home in just about any coffee shop in the world. I settled in with my journal and a latté. The last thing I wrote that day was this: I miss His Presence.

From the time I was a little girl, I could sense God’s presence so easily. It wasn’t something I had to conjure up, nor did I have to create time and space in order to feel his presence. I felt it so keenly, not only in those places and spaces where you expect to sense God, but in simply living life. Country roads, pastures, and creeks made up my world and it was there that I connected with God. House and farm chores even brought a sense of God as I went about my tasks. 

My journal entry was written out of a longing to sense his presence again. I’ve come through a fairly long season where he wasn’t present as I remember, and I missed that. I missed Him–that knowingness that he is nearby. I couldn’t sense him. My faith stayed intact, though it was a challenge and I had lots of questions. It was a faith like I had never had before, one in which my faith didn’t have an emotional or feeling side to it. I’m not a terribly expressive kind of person, more middle of the road, but this faith without feeling, without a sense of his presence, was more like abandonment, like God had left me. 

Believing, trusting, praying, worshipping, with a heart numb to his presence did not make the belief, trust, prayer or worship come easy. I wanted it to be different, to go back to what I once knew. My heart was blank, and so many times I just felt like I was going through the motions when it came to prayer, teaching, the Word. It's like telling someone you love them, but not feeling the love. Oh, there were a few times, moments really, when his presence came to me, but it was always short-lived. 

Perhaps I've been in a season that John of the Cross wrote about in the 16th century in his book, Dark Night of the Soul. He writes that the dark night is obscure. It can last for months, or even years. That has been my experience. Though there are a few who record of it lasting for decades, as in Mother Teresa, it is generally a temporary thing. While writing this post, I remembered that I had posted this blog five years ago after reading excerpts from the Dark Night of the Soul. Reading through the post again gave new understanding into this season, one that I don't think I fully grasped at the time I wrote the post. If you take the time to read it, I believe it describes the very places where God did his work in me during this dark season - spiritual greed, spiritual pride, spiritual wrath, spiritual gluttony. Interesting, isn't it, that each one begins with spiritual? 

I wonder if Jesus felt the dark night in the garden of Gethsemane the night before his death. His words, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, lead me to believe so. I wonder if it was a dark night for Peter after the denial of his friend, Jesus, but more so, his Messiah. What a day when Jesus reaffirmed his love for him on the shores of Galilee! 

While visiting my daughter, I noticed a book lying on her bedside table entitled The Helper, by Catherine Marshall. She had recently read it, telling me the impact it had on her life. At the onset of this journey, I had been influenced by one of Catherine Marshall’s other books, Beyond Ourselves. it seemed ironic that a decade later, here laid another Marshall book at my daughter’s home in New Zealand. If I ever write a book, she would be my model to follow. Her books have brought conviction to those places where God's Spirit is at work in my life, encouragement to draw closer to the Father, and wisdom to know how to live my faith where the rubber hits the road. 

Books feed my intellectual pathway in connecting with God, and so with my longing to feel him again, I began to read The Helper, a book on the Holy Spirit’s presence and work in our lives.

Over the weeks of my visit, the book continued to speak into my heart, but one particular morning (same routine as before), I began to read a chapter entitled, “Something More.” I tuned out the peripheral noise of friends talking over coffee and the explosion of steam in the making of lattés, and leaned in with hope. It didn't take long for the words to tumble into my heart. God's presence was so evident. No doubt it was him. His presence is so tender and warm. He is always a God of loving and gracious conviction, not one of condemnation. 

I resonated with Catherine's prayer at the end of the chapter (in part): 

Lord, I do not want to waste the years left to me on this earth. Nor, do I want to go through life as a spiritual beggar, in rags, subsisting on the leftovers and the crumbs when I can be a child of the King . . . Yet Lord, I know that the gift of the Spirit is not for my joy alone; rather he is given as power for service. You alone can kindle in my heart the deep, fervent desire to be used like that . . . give me your own holy passion. Amen.

Tears immediately welled up, and right there, on August 5, in that coffee shop in Christchurch, NZ, God’s Spirit began to emerge in my heart. Something I hadn’t felt for a long time. Was the dark night over? It had been too long, this dark place in my soul, but the light of his presence began to emerge like the sun rising over the horizon.

I didn’t care that the tears ran down my face amid coffee shop patrons. I began to write feverishly at what I was feeling in my heart: 

Even now, I can feel my spirit being refreshed, renewed, as his Spirit lovingly, gently and graciously comes to me. No wonder my word for the year is “in.” It seemed so little, too small, so insignificant, but I knew it was for me and even there the Spirit was making ready my spirit for His work in my life in 2014. 

It's now late September and the sense of His presence remains - for which I am thankful. Looking back, I realize God was preparing my heart for my ordination a month later.