God, where are you?
I actually have not been in a position to sense God’s presence with me for therefore long now. I actually have been asking this query repeatedly for months and months and months, and I’m bone-weary from not hearing a solution.
Spiritual dusk, the time of night after twilight, is once we first begin to feel just like the presence of God is hidden, veiled, pulled back for some unknown, frustrating reason. It’s not yet completely dark. There remains to be some light, though fading. But these are the moments in your darkening path when you could squint to see the way in which forward.
In this season of disorientation, I don’t know what God is doing exactly, but I actually have a way of God’s intentional hiddenness, God’s purposeful obscurity. God is hiding his face from me. Why? My theological fill-in-the-blank answer is that God wants to rework me by some means. But mostly, I actually have questions. No answers appear to be enough.
Yet, Scripture does give us examples of God’s obscurity . . . God concealing his glory or appearing in a dark cloud or in murky darkness (emphases added):
The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. Exodus 20:21, ESV
“You got here near and stood on the foot of the mountain, while the mountain burned with fire to the guts of heaven, wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom.” Deuteronomy 4:11, ESV
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, however the things which are revealed belong to us and to our youngsters perpetually, that we may do all of the words of this law.” Deuteronomy 29:29, ESV
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me perpetually? How long will you hide your face from me? Psalm 13:1, ESV
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to get your hands on a matter is the glory of kings. Proverbs 25:2
Truly, you might be a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior. Isaiah 45:15, ESV
“He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what’s within the darkness, and the sunshine dwells with him.” Daniel 2:22, ESV
I’ll be the primary to let you know that best practice biblical exegesis requires greater than a straightforward word study or a number of verses as “proof of concept,” but a way of God’s hiddenness may be found throughout the Scriptures, throughout history, throughout our spiritual formation. I suppose I’m reminding us each of that, me and also you, in order that we don’t feel so alone or confused when God’s presence seems more like absence. There is a few kind of divine precedence here. But the why and the where is God of all of it? That, I still can’t answer.
I’ve been in spiritual seasons adjoining to this one before, seasons of lament brought on by illness and grief. Yet even in those seasons, I knew God’s withness with me. I knew Emmanuel’s presence. I felt God’s comfort.
This is different.
Something has shifted.
My relationship with God was once different. Easier, perhaps. More naive in one of the best sense—trusting, guileless, childlike. I had a transparent vision of what God was doing in my life, where God was leading. I had certainty, clarity. But this 12 months, God appears to be obscuring my lucidity, and doing so intentionally.
I’ve found myself calling this a breadcrumb 12 months. Like Hanzel and Gretel, I’m following a trail of crumbs, uncertain if it would result in more loss or more hope. And God is being enigmatic, giving me appetizers, not the meal—crumbs, but not the entire loaf. God is giving me pieces, not the puzzle. God is giving me glimpses, not the view. In this breadcrumb 12 months, hope is available in fragments.
This mystery of what God is as much as while God seems to have withdrawn from me—yet also by some means beckoning me to follow him on some pathless path—doesn’t feel particularly enjoyable. My faith appears like a pile of breadcrumbs, and I don’t have much wherewithal to think rightly about what God is doing or not doing, as I prepare to say goodbye to my best friend of 1 / 4 of a century. As I find myself within the confusion of dusk.
And look, I’m a pastor. I do know that spiritual transformation doesn’t occur in comfort. But knowing something, even believing something, doesn’t make it easy to internalize. When something doesn’t feel true, sometimes the one thing we are able to do is take a look at what has been true before. We must remember at nighttime what we knew in the sunshine. Remember under the moon what we knew in sunnier seasons. We even remember nights we’ve been in before—perhaps not as dark, perhaps not as long—and the way we stepped out into daylight again to find that God was with us the entire time. Relying on what we find out about God’s character, goodness, and revelation gives us sustenance for the journey ahead. Intentionally recalling how God has worked previously helps us make out his presence in our hazy now. Looking on the lives of other followers of God throughout history gives us hope as we see how God has used the obscure evening before.
I suppose that’s why I keep showing up each morning to this armchair, tracing the identical well- worn path in my journal that I actually have all 12 months. It’s all I do know to do. My mornings with God on this silent season aren’t awe-inspiring or productive. Mostly, my time with God is easy repetition, however the repetition has change into a practice in spiritual survival. St. John of the Cross says faith is a habit of the soul.1 So that is my habit of religion each morning: I read a psalm, a liturgy, a book on darkness, the poetry of Rosemerry Whatola Trommer, or a lament from Natasha Sistrunk Robinson’s Voices of Lament. And I wait for God to point out up.
God, for some reason, just keeps not showing up. But I’m here, asking God where are you?, and selecting to hunt him even when I’m undecided I’ll find him.
This is the strange thing in regards to the dark night: It by some means obscures us from connecting with God, while drawing us deeper into desire for that connection. The Absence, the Unknowing, the Pulling Away, all of it serves as a form of magnet pulling us toward divine Love.
At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
I suppose in my every day armchair habit each morning, I’m desperately reaching out for Jesus’ robe within the darkness. Mostly, I’m crying out, God, I don’t know where you might be on this obscurity, but please don’t let me go. Mostly, I’m reminding my soul that he won’t. God has found me before. We have found one another.
Remember, this oh my soul— even within the evening when finding is so elusive.
Adapted from What We Find within the Dark: Loss, Hope, and God’s Presence in Grief by Aubrey Sampson. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.
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