:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

At my brother-in-law’s graduation from college a few years back, the speaker talked about faith and doubt. His central theme was the following: “Never doubt in the darkness what God has shown you in the light.”

This past week there have been a number of dark events hitting many of my friends and colleagues. One group lost a good friend to a climbing tragedy and another group lost a friend and colleague to a personal tragedy.

Such tragedies sometimes push us toward uncomfortable questions.

These kinds of questions aren’t the ones where we can expect neat answers. I feel like a child asking God, wondering what’s happening and only finding out that it’s something I can’t understand, that even if God explained it to me I wouldn’t get it.

When people bump into a mystery like that they typically respond in one of two ways:

Rejection

When confronted with mystery or something that defies rational explanation, they reject the very idea of a deity who would either let such things happen or who is incapable of giving a rational accounting of himself. To their own thinking, any deity worth believing in should align with the limits of human conception, and since they can develop satisfactory explanations of this world without a deity in the mix, it’s just as well to toss him aside.

Hope in What We Know and Have Experienced

Though we can’t arrive at satisfactory conclusions to all of our questions, that isn’t necessarily a reason to forget what God has done in our lives and the ways he has revealed himself. In fact, by clinging to the moments of God’s light in our lives, he may meet us in the dark times with his comfort.

I’m not an expert in grief, but in my own times of loss God has been a present comfort, reinforcing his work in my life that has come during happier times. Though God was willing to be present in my grief, I could have resisted God’s presence in the moments of darkness and denied his ability to speak in the midst of the hard questions.

However, for those who remain open, he has words of comfort and of hope. His Kingdom within us can grow and become stronger. That doesn’t mean we’ll find the answers we’ve been looking for, but in the process we will find the God we’ve been longing for. God will be present for us in the darkness as he was in the light. However, it may not look and feel the way we expect.

By the way, the man who said, “Never doubt in the darkness what God has shown you in the light,” had recently lost his sight. He had to be led to the podium to give his talk. Even as he confronted suffering in his own life and lost a crucial faculty, he remained open to the message that God gave to him—one that he could share with others. I’m still blessed by that message to this day.

Even the darkness can be turned to day with our God.