I have read the accounts of many people who have passed through a dark night of the soul and lived to tell about it. They are able then to stand on the other side and tell us what they have taken from the experience. I have benefited from that. I just am finishing an account of a pastor who, in spiritual crisis, left the church after 20 years of ministry. But it’s not her detailing of the lessons learned that strike me. It is her description of the middle- the unknown, the fear.
I am in the midst of my own dark night. I am not at the end looking back. I’m in the middle, and I cannot see forward. As I write, I have the sense that things are going to get much worse before they get better. Much of this hardship is self-inflicted. The verdict is still out on what will become of very large parts of my life. I need God to be big enough for this. I need to know that there aren’t dark sections of my being that are somehow falling outside the boundary lines of his mercy and provision.
“He will save his people from their sins.” All of them? Even the future ones? So, I am pulling these thoughts through the sieve of a very present disillusionment. I am hoping and longing that the words of this poem, adapted from a psalm, are true:
We go to the desolate valley by choice,
In our twisted, poisoned brokenness,
Driven by our torments,
Absorbed in want,
Wasting what remains.
He goes to the desolate valley by choice,
In love,
And turns it into a place of springs