The Long Dark Night Of The Soul

Not everyone will encounter it, and not every soul will feel it as strongly as another soul might, but there is a period of trial that in it's depth can almost strangle us. Mother Teresa felt it acutely like a sense of abandonment from God. And others have felt it as a confusion and a deep sense of unknowing. Job encountered it when he lost everything, absolutely everything and sat naked in the ashes with his wife telling him to "Curse God and die!".

I have known some of it's sting when lonely and down I have felt like heaven is closed and my prayers are no longer heard. This is the long dark night of the soul. We are not taught of it in Sunday school where all the answers to the questions are "Jesus". We don't talk much of it in bible school where the times are good, and the friends are near. God is just around the corner and we are creeping closer all the time. But now out in the world we find it. It isolates, and hauls us off into the places where we would have never thought that we would go.

And so what is the answer? Why has God left us? Is heaven closed to our approaches? Or is there something else going on.

I think that the book of Job was written for this very reason. Here we have a man who is deeply blessed of God. Things have gone so very well for him. And suddenly it all goes wrong. Not just slightly but deeply and in every way. Has he done wrong? Has he been spurned by God? No!

Job is never able to see the heavenly things. He is never shown the events of Satan's desire to tempt, and test Job. He is not shown God's pleasure in Job's upright living. He is never shown any of these things. But he is called to trust that God is in control no matter what. He is in control and powerfully good even if our feelings are wrong.

It is a beautiful test to be given the opportunity to have faith even in the depths of this dark night of the soul. We are called to yell out like Job from the ashes.

"He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return there. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. May the name of the Lord be blessed!” In all this Job did not sin, nor did he charge God with moral impropriety." (Job 1:21-22)

Why do we think that just because he doesn't feel close that he is not close? Why do we place so much emphasis on feeling? As if it was the deciding factor in our salvation, or God's relationship to us.

Some have called this test a second baptism. A testing of your faith through even a lack of feeling. I'm not so sure it needs so high a status. It could be seen as God's discipline of us. And don't forget that he only disciplines the one's he loves.

Maybe this brief discussion on the dark night of the soul will encourage anyone who reads it to see it as Job saw it. God exercising his sovereign will. He will do what he wills, "May the name of the Lord be blessed". So let us not wallow in sin, or pity, or anything of that stagnate nature, but instead hold on firm to the truths we know. That is know with our heads and not with our feelings. Feelings are subject to change, but truth never does.

God is near with healing arms for the repentant, and wrath for the unregenerate.

Well I share just in case you cared, and if you don't that's ok too.