In March of 2011, about eleven months after my season in the Darkness began, I went on a mission trip to South Padre Island. In the weeks leading up to departure, I really tried to pray in preparation. By that point though, prayer was such a struggle for me because I often felt like I was talking to a wall, like God had stopped listening to anything I had to say. Nonetheless, I asked God to prepare the mission field for me and me for it.
A few weeks before the trip, I lost my Bible. I last saw my little leather-bound black Bible in my backpack, but one day I looked and it wasn’t there. It wasn’t at my house, in my car, or anywhere else I’d recently been either. I searched for days, but I couldn’t find it. Frustration bubbled up inside of me and I felt that losing my Bible was the epitome of the season I was in. Fine God, I thought, if you don’t want to talk to me then I have no desire to talk to you either.
After about a week or so of not having my Bible, I gave in and bought a new one that was the exact type as the one I’d lost. A few more days passed as I tried to get accustomed to the clean, unused Bible but then, in what is one of the strangest and most inexplicable moments of my life so far, I found my old Bible. I vividly remember the moment when I was digging through my backpack trying to find the new Bible, and suddenly I pulled out not one, but TWO Bibles. Stunned, I froze and let my mouth drop open. I tried to catch the attention of strangers around me as if to ask them, “Did you put this here? Where did this come from?”
So, just a couple of weeks before my mission trip, I found myself in possession of a brand new Bible. It was clear to me that I was supposed to give that new Bible away, and I figured it had to go to someone that I’d meet on the mission field. In the final days before the trip I prayed for the discernment to know whose Bible that would become. When I left for South Padre, I kept my eyes pealed for the person on that island who needed the Bible. The days passed though, ministry exhausted me, and no one seemed to be the person to whom the Bible was to go.
On the second to last day of ministry, I packed my backpack up for the day. In it I put the new Bible, my journal, iPod, a book I was reading, and some other random things. I still had my eye out for the person that needed the Bible, so I wanted to have it with me in the moment of ministry.
To make a long story short: my backpack was stolen that night. When I realized it was missing my first thought was not about the Bible. But after sorting through the chaos, it soon dawned on me that the Bible was in my backpack, which was no longer in my possession. All those weeks I’d been praying that the Lord would help me give away the new Bible, and look what he did.
It made me so mad. But my anger didn’t last long.
One day on the mission trip my team and I went to the beach just before sunrise to pick up the massive amount of garbage that was flung all over the coastline. After filling dozens of trash bags with empty beer cans and cigarette butts, we gathered at the edge of the waves and worshipped. A part of my heart was hesitant to open myself up to worshipping because I was still struggling with the Darkness. I was just so tired of praising a God who didn’t seem real anymore. But as I stared out into the ocean that stretched before me, and as I watched the sun crawl out of the far off waves into the morning sky, I was reminded of the Lord’s faithfulness.
(The Arabian Sea on the West coast of India, choppy in monsoon season)
The ocean for me has always been a symbol of God’s faithfulness, his nearness. Standing at water’s edge, listening to the gentle shh of the waves rushing over the sand, my heart was filled with peace. For the first time in almost a year, I truly believed that God was not far off. I finally understand that he was near to me always. As I stood there at the ocean, the song “Never Once” was being played on guitar behind me. And for the first time in almost a year, I heard the Lord speak.
“I am here,” he said. He said it once and then it was silent again. But that’s all he needed to say.
That morning on the beach it began to snow in my soul. There wasn’t a blizzard or even a flurry. It was instead a small amount, just a few flakes that fluttered in. Slowly, the landscape of my soul began to change.
Over the next couple of months, I continued to pull myself back together. To some extent, I was finally coming out of the Dark Night of the Soul. Things were by no means back to normal though. I still didn’t feel much emotion when I prayed, sang worship songs, or read my Bible. But it felt like less of an obligation, less of a task to do these things. There was still a considerably large part of me that doubted the Lord’s existence, but I knew I wasn’t going to walk away from him. The small amount of snow that I’d felt on Spring Break was enough to tether my heart to the cross and believe that something new was on the horizon.
Around Easter time I was reading through the crucifixion story and talking with some friends about whether or not Jesus was separated from God in the moments before his death. I read about how Jesus, after being betrayed, tortured, and crucified, shouted from the Cross, “God my God, why have you forsaken me?” Reading that made me think seriously about two things:
First, I realized that even Jesus experienced a feeling of doubt and abandonment. Though he knew his whole life what his purpose on Earth was, in the face of great pain and death, Jesus felt abandoned by his father. In that moment, he felt like even God had given up on him. But the second thing I thought about was whether the Father really did abandon Jesus. Did the Father separate himself from his son?
(A magnificent sunset in the Turkish countryside, which is blanketed in sunflower fields)
I thought about these things and this story for several weeks. I kept reading through scripture and going over the theology of it all in my head. Then one evening I was home alone in my kitchen and out of nowhere a revelation from the Lord fell on my heart and knocked me, quite literally, off my feet. I stood in my kitchen, then fell to the floor, as the Lord revealed to me great truth about Jesus on the Cross.
When Jesus was hanging on the Cross, he did indeed feel abandoned by his father. After experiencing a lifetime full of things that made him a man of great sorrows, acquainted with the deepest grief (Isaiah 53), things culminated on the Cross when Jesus endured one final, immeasurable moment of pain. And Jesus cried out, “God, where are you right now? Why have you walked away from me?”
The Father heard his son say this. The Father was not far off. In response to Jesus’ final plea, I believe Father God said this: “My son with whom I am well pleased, I see you. I see you there on that Cross. I see that you are suffering and in pain. I hear your cry for help. But I need you to stay there. I need you to stay there and hang on that Cross until every last part of you dies so that I can fill you up and bring you back to Life again.”
The Father once said that to Jesus and then he said it to me. He said to me, “Emily, I see you. I am near. I see that you are suffering and struggling, and I hear your every prayer. But I need you to hang there on your cross – hang there and die. Every last part of you must die because only then can I fill you back up and bring you to Life again.”
Stay tuned for the final blog of this series.
