God in the Dark

God in the Dark

The setting sun poured down the seams of the mountains as I drove the same route I had taken for four years in college. But this time was different. My six-year-old daughter now sat in the back, and she was sobbing. “I don’t want to go home to sisters and—and to boys!”

I smiled. My husband is the only “boy” in our house, but I understood why my daughter didn’t want to go home to two sisters. For twenty-four hours, my firstborn had been my only girl. She had held my hand, cuddled me to the edge of the hotel bed, sat on my lap after lunch. She had seen the Bennett building where I had taken my English major classes, collected seashells from the rock beds outside my old dorm, and pointed out the birds scattering like buck shot from the top of Gatliff Chapel.

It was an incredibly surreal experience to show her the place that had hosted my most dramatic growth until I gave birth to her and that growing began in earnest. As she continued to cry in the backseat, I said, “We need to find a healthy way for you to process what you feel.”

My six-year-old looks like her father, but she soaks up life like I do. I wouldn’t change who I am because without that soaking, I wouldn’t be compelled to pour out what I feel through words. However, I want to teach my daughter how to see the difference between entertaining emotions and embracing Truth.

The other night, I had a crash course in embracing Truth when I came back from my walk and couldn’t find my phone. My husband tried calling it, and it went straight to voicemail. I had an image of my phone at the bottom of the creek. I retraced half of the walk before the girls were in bed and half of it afterward.

I cut a left across the overgrown path that led to the spring. It took me a while to gather my bearings in the dark, and then I walked up the leaf-strewn ledges to the partially charred oak where the spring appeared to seep. I didn’t see my teal phone case anywhere. Behind me, a branch snapped. I whirled, holding out my daughter’s cheap green flashlight. My breath puffed out in front of that beam. There was nothing there.

“Mind over matter,” I muttered, rather thrilled with my nocturnal adventure.

And then I thought about that: Mind over matter.

It was so easy for me to know the truth that there was nothing out there and continue walking in the dark, but it was much harder for me to know the Truth concerning life’s hardest places.

You want to know the rock bottom truth? My husband and I are weary.

Disappointed is too harsh a word when I can sit here on this kitchen chair and listen to my healthy girls playing in the living room, and yet we are definitely weary. We want to see God move, and yet sometimes my prayers feel like that breath of air puffed out in front of the flashlight beam: visible for a moment before evaporating.

But as I continued walking past my sister-in-law’s house, and then along the neighbor’s border, sweeping the flashlight beam across the wet grass, I felt God speak to me, “Daughter, you’re too nearsighted.” There was no condemnation in that voice. It was more of a parent gently nudging his child’s chin to gaze up beyond herself and her small problems.

I ducked beneath the evergreen branches beside another spring. I could hear the water trickling in the dark, a reminder of what I knew was there in the day.

I whispered, “I would do anything if I could just see You.”

And then, I knew the Truth.

When the sun is shining, it is easy for me to believe God is working all things for good. But when I’m walking in the dark, with only a weak flashlight beam directing me, any snapping branch makes my belief falter. But that is when I must cling to the Truth that I am never truly in the dark because I carry the Light of Jesus, who resides inside of me.

That great Truth gives me the courage to lift my gaze beyond myself and hold that Light high, shining hope in the darkness, so that others may be drawn to the One who called that Light into being.

Sarah Van Diest’s beautiful devotional, God in the Dark, is an honest examination of faith in the midst of life’s hardest places. Hold fast to your faith, my friends. You are so loved.