Hope When Our Eyes Are Darkened . . .

Jill Carattini of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries wrote the following for "A Slice of Infinity," over which she is the managing editor. May I whet your appetite to read the entire article here by saying that we all face what the Puritans termed "The Dark Night of the Soul." I think some of that is included in what she says. Want hope? Read on . . . 

Dark Though It Is

“My soul is too cramped for you to enter it,” lamented Saint Augustine of God. Later, he would find this cry itself something of an answer. For uttering it was to admit that God was there. It is God who makes God known to us--even in our restless longing, even as our souls are cramped with sin and the journey at times seems more a fight for autonomy than a means to knowledge. And yet somehow we come to know an incomprehensible God.

Author Anne Lamott might word it differently, though the effect is the same. “The Holy Spirit rarely respects one’s comfort zones,” she writes of her unlikely story of faith and conversion. Beginning with the closing lines of W.S. Merwin, she articulates her propulsion from non-belief to belief. “We are saying thank you and waving, dark though it is.”(1) Tracing her leaps or lurches toward faith, she describes darkness in a broken world and an unpredictable childhood, the dimming affects of self-loathing, addiction, fear, and grief. And she describes the presence of one to thank regardless, one whose light gradually appeared through a world that slowly cracked into a thousand pieces. 

Whether the journey of faith is a dramatic miracle or more like a gift that requires some assembly, we are put together by the one who knows us best. “Man is born broken,” quotes Lamott. “He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” In his care for all of our many pieces, God reveals Himself as the God who is there. And in unlikely stories of faith and conversion, whether the apostle Paul’s or Anne Lamott’s, masses in China or individuals in the Middle East, in them and in their faith, God invites us to reconsider the depths and reaches such a promise entails: “Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear” (Isaiah 59:1).

Saint Augustine, who once labored in dark and cramped crevices to see the God of light, later realized that to look for God is to find Him. Often, I think we don’t know that we’re looking. Our restless hearts are crying out for Someone, but all we hear is gibberish and think of ourselves as crazy. Other times, perhaps we aren’t really looking so much as we are being looked for. Regardless, faith begins long before we have eyes to see. “The world of souls is a vast and broken place,” said a wise friend of mine. “Most stumble in blindness. But where you see an eye of the kingdom, or a soul squinting at light, rejoice, for God is near.”

The Spirit of God is both the healer of our blindness and the light by which we see the kingdom, our selves and neighbors, and Christ who saves us.  Beside the savior, we find ourselves as pilgrims moving toward the faith God ordained and the life God intended. The journey is not always straight or sensical; it is usually demanding and requires continual surrender, but we walk with Christ himself. The way of the Cross is unpredictable, except for the dying and rising. But there is unfathomable mercy for the journey and light that will not be overcome, no matter the darkness.