Grace, Love, and Times of Darkness

Never assume that the way you feel at any given moment will not change. It will.

This is a vital truth for the struggling believer to receive because it can bring new hope for deliverance from times of darkness, and thus new strength in the midst of those times. In my own life I have known bouts of depression and anxiety that I feared would never end. It has only been the repeated experience of deliverance from these troubled periods that has finally brought me to a place where I can consistently trust that they will pass. Much of my progress towards trusting in God’s enduring presence in my life has come from the realization that He has always allowed me to sooner or later find relief from emotional and spiritual pain. It has also been a key to experiencing that pain less often and with less intensity.

One of the worst aspects of “dark nights of the soul” is the sense that the sunrise will never come. It appears to be a truism that when one is in the grip of doubts and fears those doubts and fears seem inescapable. The human mind and heart can have a tendency to assume that the worst case scenario is the most likely one to come true (this is especially the case for those with a nature that tends towards the melancholy end of the spectrum. For us this could almost be said to be the “default setting” of our being).

When such fatalism has sway over a person, consciously or unconsciously, it has a tendency to self-perpetuate. I firmly believe that this is probably the greatest cause of suicide for those who find themselves deeply depressed without the light of Christ in their lives. When such individuals find themselves in great agony of soul, with no felt prospect of that condition ever changing, impulses towards the imagined escape offered by death become difficult to resist.

However in the life of the true child of God, the desperately needed hope of deliverance is birthed and sustained by His sovereign grace. Christians may endure long periods of depression and anxiety, even moments of despair, but the presence of God through His Holy Spirit is the guarantee of the passing of these shadows of death. He will not suffer His people to be lost to even the deepest buffetings of the world, the flesh, and the devil. As the Bible tells us, “If we are faithless He is faithful because He cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim 2:13). It is the steadfast persistence of His love that enables us to come out of every test of darkness.

After enough demonstrations of this kind of love even the densest of us can begin to notice a pattern. We feel terrible for whatever reason and then, whether it is gradually or suddenly, we do not. The clouds over our spirits lift, the sun once again is shining, and we are again capable of feeling its light on our faces. This happens over and over as we continue to seek God in our worst moments. In time the result of our experiencing this fruit of sustaining grace is the dawning realization that all bad things come to an end in Christ.

Once this realization becomes a fixed part of our consciousness we begin to assume something other than the worst for ourselves. We start to believe that maybe, just maybe, the darkness is temporary and the love and grace of our Lord is not. This is one of the most important paths to healing for the melancholy Christian.

So if you, child of God, are in your own dark night of the soul, cling to the truth of these words and, far more importantly, cling to the promises of God’s faithfulness to you in His word. Your trials will pass and something of greater worth will replace them, true perseverance in the faith guaranteed by the One who loves you beyond the power of any and all darkness.

© 2009 Shea Oakley. All rights reserved.

Shea Oakley is a freelance Christian writer from Ridgewood, New Jersey