When Darkness Seems Overwhelming

And Why It Will Bring the Best Out in You

When Darkness Seems Overwhelming

My last post was about the dark side of the moon, the other side. In the last few days the astronauts have been floating around the press calls, amazing pictures have dropped and now we wait for the film! Until then, have you considered that there is actually one darkness that finds you whether you’re looking for it or not. Great crunching gear-change!

There’s a psalm in your Bible that doesn’t end well.

No resolution. No breakthrough. No final verse where the clouds part and the light comes flooding in. Simon and Garfunkel had a brilliant song back in the last century, ‘The sound of Silence’ with the well known words,

“Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again…”

Such is Psalm 88. It starts in darkness and it ends in darkness – and God in His sovereign wisdom, left it brushed and pasted right there in Scripture. Don’t be tempted to jump to the next song, stay with it, it’s not a comfortable read when you are feeling at the end of your tether, but… it will remind you of God’s presence.

The man who wrote it wasn’t fragile. Heman the Ezrahite was a sage whose wisdom rivalled Solomon’s. His name sounds like something out of the Marvel hero dynasty. He’d been carrying this weight since his youth and wasn’t writing from the other side of it. He was writing from inside it. The final Hebrew word of the psalm is mahsak – darkness. No softening. No tidy Piper-esq theological pivot. Just darkness, as the last word. And God placed it Scripture. For you.

I’m currently reading Matt Hatch’s excellent new book Trials that Transform: How God Uses Suffering to Shape the Soul – and I find myself wondering whether this particular darkness, this mahsak, makes it in. It should, because what Heman gives us isn’t a chapter on suffering. It’s suffering with a pen in its hand.

What do you do with that?

You recognise it. Because if you’ve also walked through a long unrelenting season – where prayer felt like speaking into a wall, where the people around you drifted, where your own emotions started lying to you – you know this psalm from the inside. The fact that God preserved it, authorised it, placed it between battle hymns and songs of praise, tells you something important. He is not embarrassed by your darkness. He built room for it in His Word.

I lay in bed last night thinking about when Solomon dedicated the temple in 1 Kings 8, the glory of God filled the house – it came in the form of a thick cloud. Darkness. The priests couldn’t even stand to minister. And Solomon, looking at it, quotes Exodus: “The Lord said He would dwell in thick darkness.” Not in spite of the darkness. In it. It spoke of dense, heavy obscurity. The same word used when Moses drew near to God at Sinai while the people stood at a distance.

What this means, grab your coffee and get ready to stare out of your window, is that the darkness you’re in may not be God’s absence. It may be His address. He’s there. Also there.

Elsewhere Matthew 27:45 draws us deep into the gospel narrative, telling us with a hushed whisper, that from noon until three in the afternoon, darkness covers the entire land. Not metaphorical darkness. Actual, physical, mid-afternoon darkness. Right in that moment, wrapped inside it, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The Son of God, perfect, sinless and without guilt or shame and for our sake, enters the mahsak. Fully. Without reservation. He did not stand at the edge of human darkness and offer comfort from a safe, discrete distance. He went in. And then He took it somewhere Heman never could – through death and out the other side.

And that is what you call a ‘mic-drop’.

The miracle of Psalm 88 is not that Heman found relief, but such was his character and walk with God that he never stopped praying. He ended in darkness, still talking to God. Faithful. That’s not defeat. That ‘s the most profound act of faith in the entire song book. You are welcome to do the same. You are allowed to say, ‘I don’t understand this’. I don’t feel You. I am not okay. And I am still here.

The darkness is not a pause in your story. It is active. Something is being built in you that cannot be built any other way.

That’s the case in Romans 5. Paul insists, (and it’s more than a good flow of the pen) that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, character produces hope. That’s worth memorising. There isn’t a shortcut. God didn’t build one in. The compassion that actually reaches people comes from having been in the pit yourself. The faith that anchors others in a storm only exists in someone who has been in the storm.

Joseph (of amazing Technicolor dream coat fame) knew this. Thirteen years between the dream and the throne – betrayal, slavery, false accusation. When he finally stood before the brothers who sold him, what emerged wasn’t bitterness. It was the understanding, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20). That could only be spoken by someone who’d been through what he’d been through. The darkness Joseph experienced didn’t disqualify the dream. It prepared the dreamer.

I’m done. Long seasons of suffering can disorient us, make us lose our bearing. Heman began to believe God’s purpose was to terrorise him. It wasn’t. The feelings were real – but they were not accurate. The person who comes through the dark times is not the same one who walked in. You will have a theology that can’t be shaken easily, because it was tested. A faith that isn’t borrowed from someone else’s testimony. It’s yours.

And somewhere in that thick darkness, closer than you think is the God is who there. Keep praying, believing and being faithful.

The Other Side of the Moon

252,756 miles from home. God was there. Already.

252,756 miles from home.

Three days ago, four human beings were 252,756 miles from home.

You read that too quickly. Not 252 miles. Not 2,500. Two hundred and fifty-two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-six miles from everything you treasure, find reassuring or familiar. Breath-taking and at a distance from Earth greater than any human being has ever been in history, and they did a Lewis Hamilton drift around the far side of the moon and suddenly… gazed at it with their own eyes for the very first time since humans were created.

Astronaut Christina Koch floated over to the window and looking out in awe said, “That is the dark side. That is something we have never seen before.”

She was right. And she was also, without knowing it, bearing witness to something far larger than a space mission.

Because, 252,756 miles away from home, God was already there. Waiting. No travel necessary.

Not arriving. Not observing from a distance. Already there. Filling that silence the way he fills everything – completely, without beginning, without effort. The far side of the moon has been hidden from human sight since the dawn of creation, and not one square metre of it has ever been beyond his reach. David knew this without a space programme. “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there, if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (Psalm 139:7-8). The man was writing theology that would take us three millennia and a Star-trek rocket ship to even begin to feel the weight of.

The evidence of God’s presence in that unreachable place wasn’t written in fire or thunder. It was written in the crew themselves; four friends on an adventure, 252,756 miles from home, with beating hearts and breathing lungs and minds no ecstatic with awe and wonder. Koch looked back at Earth from that mind-numbing distance and with a misguided but understandable comment said, “Everything we need, Earth provides. And that is somewhat of a miracle – one that you can’t truly know until you’ve had the perspective of the other.”

She was groping for something she didn’t quite have words or vocabulary for. It was about flesh and blood made in the express image of the Creator, arriving at the place he never left, and feeling the immense weight of it in their bones, minds and hearts. Seeing the unseen, not for a second or two, but gazing, blinking, staring for nearly 40 minutes.

That’s what glory does, often when you are lost in awe and wonder as you worship. Sometimes as you look into scripture. You think you’ve grasped it, and then it opens into something larger. It happened to me in the minutes I became a Christian where it seemed to me that GOD was in the room and I was in SO much trouble – only to meet a deluge of mercy, grace and love. Here, Isaiah walks into the temple and is undone – not by a small, manageable holiness, but by a presence so vast barely the hem of God’s robe fills the entire house (Isaiah 6:1). The seraphim cry holy three times because once could never be enough. Paul prays in Ephesians 3 that we’d know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” – and he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s asking you to grasp what simply cannot be grasped. Every fresh encounter with God’s infinite glory doesn’t exhaust it, it merely widens your capacity to receive more.

252,756 miles from home. The farthest any human being has ever travelled. And what did they find on the hidden face of creation? Craters filled with history, ancient basins from day four of creation. (I can’t bring myself to say billions of years!) Eight retina’s squinting at the sun’s corona blazing in an eclipse no human eye had ever witnessed from that place, and until now, only ever just imagined.

For the astronauts it was like gate-crashing a private, intimate moment, creation, doing what it has always done – declaring the glory of the one who made it, whether anyone was watching or not.

You cannot outrun the glory of God, neither can you find the edge of it. Every time you think you’ve reached the final edges of it, a final frontier, you discover you are still in the foyer.

Eternity will be full of these moments.