“Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark-not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love?”
Wolterstorff penned these words as he wrestled with the tragic loss of his 25-year-old son as a result of a mountain climbing accident. Such devastation can hardly be put into words. However, I believe that his words of lament lead us to a truth about God, a God of love amid the darkness. I do not claim to know the bounds of pain experienced in the loss of a child; but I do know that God, if not found on the mountaintop, is present in the silence of darkness. This darkness, for me at least, shrouds much of life.
The reality of our existence on earth is in the mundanity of life. Within this truth, we realize that the mountaintop experiences that we long for are few and far between, especially in faith. Made to sustain in times of blessing and illuminate when there is a lack of understanding, these bursts of joy infuse us with a reminder to continue moving in the fight against stagnated faith. Though faith is anything but stagnate, insofar as we perceive it to be that way. We are an unreliable narrator for our own story. Faith is anything but unmoving.
Our inability to see the goodness of God in our life hampers us from understanding the bounds of his loving grace. The one flaw when viewing our faith as a journey is that it implies movement forward or backward in our minds. In truth, I believe that we are always moving forward. We just may make stops along the way. Sometimes, we believe that these stops hinder us from the presence of God. When truly, He has not left our side. He is there. We may be lying in a cave, broken, naked, and beaten down from the cruel journey, but He is there. Richard Foster writes:
“What I have come to see is that God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture. We do not have to be bright, or pure, or filled with faith, or anything. That is what grace means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well. And we pray by it.”
This “mixture” includes the darkness of our pain and the depths of our brokenness. This does not mean that we should pick ourselves up by our bootstraps despite our depression and anxiety. Instead, our work comes through faith, which some days are much harder than others. I believe that our faith grows even in the doubting, if not more from the doubting than the lack thereof. In doubt, we fight and fighting leads to respecting trust. Josh Larsen, in his book Movies are Prayers, writes:
“Lament isn’t giving up, it’s giving over. When we lift up our sorrow and our pain, we turn it over to the only one who can meet it: Our God.”
There is a delicate balance to living a life reflective of this and the hope that it can bring. Lament must not consume all that we do, but it is a part of living. It is a part of feeling when there seems to be nothing there. When our pain and sorrow eat up all that we do, cynicism begins to take root in our souls and we lose sight of gratitude, which waters the seeds of hope.
The foundation of my faith has become built on this. In Christ, we find someone willing to meet us in the depths and sit with us there. I think that faith can be boiled down to periods of lament and yearning for something more, something stronger, something that cannot be found in us and can only be found in Christ. The light rarely creeps in as we walk through this world, but the Light is with us always, whether we see Him or not.