In the stillness of a spring night, I sat at the table in my living room entirely exhausted. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually I was dried up and rough around the edges. I sat uncomfortably on a wooden chair, tears just barely damned up behind my eyelids, and two friends placed their hands on my shoulders. I dropped my chin to my chest in defeat and they began to pray. I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten to that point. I couldn’t easily trace the journey to that place where doubt and denial plagued my soul and left me absolutely terrified. The walls of my soul were so riddled with uncertainty that for the first time in my life, I doubted everything about God that I’d ever believed.
I did not fully realize it at the time, but that quiet night marked the middle of the season of my life in which I entered the Dark Night of the Soul.
By the springtime of 2011, I had been following Jesus for about a decade. Within the past five or so years though, my relationship with Christ had grown exponentially. For many different reasons, I had been transformed in major ways over the past few years and as a result, I developed an extremely intimate relationship with the Lord in a relatively short period of time.
As the spring semester of my sophomore year of college climaxed to an end, I retreated into the woods near Enchanted Rock for a weekend get-away with the Texas Wesley. I’d gotten involved with the Wesley that semester because I heard the Lord explicitly tell me I needed to. So there I was, at the top of Enchanted Rock one night underneath the most magnificent Texas sky you’ve ever seen.
(the night sky of Bulverde, TX)
The light of the stars illumined my view of the ten or so people around me as I sat on the rock, which was cooling off from the warmth of day. That night we sat in our small groups and went to the Lord for prophecies on behalf of one another. We each listened silently for a message from the Lord for a particular person. Then we shared this message out loud.
As my friends prayed and listened to God’s message for me, the Spirit did something extraordinary. He told them each the same thing. Not one, not two, but three different people said they’d each heard from the Spirit that I was soon going to enter “a season of challenge”. Those words echoed into the dark night and settled on my heart. “A season of challenge…” Two other people both individually heard the same lyrics to the same song: “Everything I am for your Kingdom’s cause…” They said those words would be true for my life.
That is where my journey into the Dark Night began – on a beautifully dark night, in the middle of the wilderness, surrounded by a great community of believers.
That summer I lived with a widow from the church who graciously opened her home to me, a stranger, for ten weeks. While it was a blessing to live with her, I struggled a lot that summer. I found myself living in silence. I didn’t have friends outside of the church, I didn’t know anyone in that part of Houston, and it often felt like I lived alone. Every evening I would come home to a quiet house with no Internet access, no one to talk to in person, and a quiet little room to keep to myself in. My life was physically silent.
By the end of the ten weeks in Houston, I was more than ready to be back in Austin. The internship was great and I’m so thankful that I got to experience it, but I was so sick of silence. I wanted to be back with friends, back in community, back at my church in Austin.
As you might suspect, the silence of the summer did not subside.
Over the next several months, the silence in my life transitioned from physical to spiritual quietness. When I prayed, I received no answer and eventually felt like God didn’t even hear me. When I read scripture, I struggled to glean something from it. At church I sang songs that once resonated so deeply but were now simply words that came out habitually.
I remember thinking at first that I was just in a “funk”. I’m just transitioning, I’d think. I’ll be back into my normal rhythm with God soon. But “soon” came and went and still I wasn’t “feeling it.”
Before that fall, I heard the voice of God on a regular basis. When I read the Bible, the words jumped off the page and took root in my life in tangible ways. At church or in worship services I felt the Holy Spirit regularly wrap around me and I experienced the presence of God consistently in ordinary life. But all of the sudden, none of this was happening any more. It was like God had slipped out the back door when I wasn’t looking.
The best thing to which I could compare it is this: It honestly felt like I was in a relationship with a boy who was in love with me and I with him. We called and texted everyday, talking about everything in our lives. He consistently communicated his affection for me, and I reciprocated it. But one day, he stopped calling, stopped texting, and refused to return my attempts to get in touch. After enough unanswered phone calls, I got the message. He was ignoring me for some unknown reason and it hurt more than I could believe.
This is how I felt when God went silent on me. It wasn’t just a funk or a phase. The Lord my lover had stopped talking to me.
