Doubt (Psalm 77)
Summary
Pastor Dominic Jackson opens Psalm 77, often called the "dark night of the soul" psalm, to explore what happens when we look for God the way we always have and can't find him. Drawing on the story of St. John of the Cross, who wrote Dark Night of the Soul after months of imprisonment and darkness, Dominic makes the case that seasons of spiritual dryness and doubt aren't signs of failure but are often invitations to deeper faith. Like a parent weaning a child or a tide pulling back before it returns stronger, God sometimes feels distant precisely because he's leading us somewhere new. With help from Mother Teresa, C. S. Lewis, Martin Luther, Annie Dillard, and Frederick Buechner, Dominic reminds us that doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is an element of it. This is part one of a two-part look at doubt and deconstruction.
Questions for reflection
Psalm 9 calls God "a stronghold in times of trouble," while Psalm 10 asks why he "stands far off." Have you ever experienced God as both present and distant? What was that season like?
St. John of the Cross believed that "the further you grow in your faith, the more distance from God during seasons you should expect to feel." Does that idea bring you comfort, challenge, or both?
Dominic asks, "Do we want God, or do we want things from God?" How would you answer that honestly about your own prayer life right now?
The psalmist longs for "the former days." Is there a past version of your faith you've been trying to get back to? What might it look like to trust that God wants to take you somewhere new instead?
Imagine choosing between the "unknown door" and the "predictable door" for the year ahead. Which would you honestly be tempted to choose, and why?
Dominic offers four practices for a dark season: inviting God into your doubt, keeping a prayer journal, following someone who can see clearly, and turning to the Psalms. Which one do you most need right now, and what's one step you could take this week?
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We continue our series this morning, where we are looking at the Psalms. And as we have explored, the Psalms are about God, obviously. But what I love about the Psalms is they offer new songs, new lyrics, passages that reveal new characteristics, new aspects, new pictures of God. And much like a diamond, the more you turn them over, the more you see these new facets of our Creator. The Psalms also, however, work like a mirror, and the more that you spend with them, the more they also reveal about you and I. The Psalms are full of joy and thanksgiving and heartache and pain and longing and wonder and anger and existentialism and beauty and lament and also doubt. The Psalms, to quote Walter Brueggemann, teach us what it means to be human.
But the problem is, humans are complicated, to state the obvious. In fact, you can look at the person next to you and say, "You're complicated," because it's true. We are incredibly complicated. Sometimes we feel conflicting things. Sometimes we lie to ourselves. Sometimes we don't even know we're lying about lying to ourselves. Often we are confused or angry or biased or misunderstood or mistaken. Sometimes we can be angry one moment, and then the next moment be heartbroken. Or—something humans are really good at—we can feel multiple emotions all at the exact same time, sometimes even conflicting emotions.
A quick example: Psalm 9:9 tells us, "The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble." Psalm 10, the next psalm over, verse 1: "Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" So which is it? Is God close to us when we are in trouble, or does he choose to use that time to distance himself and be far away? Seems like a biblical, theological contradiction, right? And worst of all, both of these psalms, 9 and 10, are written by the same guy. Even he can't seem to make up his mind. Or maybe—just maybe—the answer is a little bit simpler than that. Maybe the presence and distance of God can both exist and both be genuine. The only difference is, God doesn't change—just the person looking for him.
This morning, we look at a psalm where, in many ways, the author is living in the past, and he's curious why he can't find God there anymore. The old ways, all the old tricks, aren't really working for our psalmist. And I have to tell you, this is actually really good news.
Initially, as I was preparing for this message, I had a really, really long sermon. Don't worry, it won't be that long. But I had a really long sermon, and what I quickly discovered was there's actually two messages in there for two different psalms. And so consider this part one. More than just nostalgia, more than just looking at the past, today we also explore spiritual doubt—looking for God and not finding him the way we used to. Next week, we talk about deconstruction, which is rethinking, redefining that very search for God. One is the journey, the other the destination, to use the cliché, right? And so today we talk about doubt, the dark night of the soul. We talk about distance. Next week we talk about distancing ourselves from our past—detangling, deconstructing. Or another way to frame this: one is, I want to find God, I don't know how to look for him, and I'm not even sure all the ways I've been taught to look for him are right. The other—today's—is, I know how to look for God; I'm just not sure if he's actually there or not. That's where we're going this morning.
So let's pray together, and then we're going to hop into our psalm. And if you have anything in your hand—just an invitation—or any nagging thoughts—I often do during sermons—a to-do list, maybe, if you want to just put those to the side for a moment. Just take a deep breath, steady our hearts, our bodies for this passage we're going to look at. Let's pray.
Lord, help us to see you clearly. Help us to see you clearly even in the dark—especially in the dark. Help us, as hard as it is, to see the dark as an opportunity to not only refocus, but also a moment for all the distractions in our lives to fade away. And so, Lord, wherever each person here finds themselves—whether they could say they have never felt closer to you than they do in this moment, than they do in this season of their life; maybe they feel distant from you and feel like they have in many ways lost their way, but they so badly want to return to you; or for those who are earnestly seeking you and yet still are struggling to see and feel your presence in their lives—Lord, I pray that you meet us where we are, but also that you don't leave us where you find us. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
If you have a copy of the Scriptures, we're going to be in Psalm 77. If you want to turn there—if not, the words will be on the screen. And as you are flipping there, just a little tiny, tiny bit of history, if you could humor me. A little history—if you're not a history person, sorry, not sorry. I am. But typically, before we hop into a passage, I like to give a little bit of context, a little background, a little history of what it is we're going to be looking at, right? Today, instead of sharing a little bit of the history of the psalm, instead of looking at the psalm itself, what I want to do is give a little tiny bit of history of something that came out of this psalm, if I may.
Psalm 77 is often referred to as the "dark night of the soul" psalm. And the opening words, as we'll see in a moment here, point to why. If you have ever been in this situation before, where you just feel like a desperation, where you're just calling out to God like our psalmist is, as Addie just read a moment ago—if you have ever felt far from God, you know why this title fits really well.
The title Dark Night of the Soul actually comes from a book by a guy named St. John of the Cross. And this book explores a longing for God, the presence of God, while experiencing an absence of God. Real quick, just a tiny bit about the book. This was inspired by this psalm—a couple of psalms, but this being one of them.
During the time of the Spanish Inquisition, there was a guy named John, and John was born into extreme poverty—extreme poverty—but he worked really, really hard. Really smart guy. He got into a university, one of the most prestigious in all of Spain, and he became a really young professor at this university, and he was, like, killing it in life and doing great. Until—I think mid or late 20s—John just became filled with sorrow at all the injustices he was seeing around him, namely connected to the church, the Catholic Church. This was around the exact same time as Martin Luther in Germany and everything going on with the Protestant Reformation. And so John, like many others, began speaking out against all this corruption, all these injustices that he had seen through the church.
And because of this, eventually John is put in prison. He's put in solitary confinement in the church basement. If your church has a prison, that's never a good sign. This church did. And so he's thrown in prison, and he is not allowed to bathe or change his clothes. He must live in absolute filth for months and months and months. And he's in the dark this whole time. The only time—once a day—he's allowed to go outside and see the sun. And once he's taken out—this was a punishment as psychological as it was physical—he would be beaten during this time. And so he longs to feel the sun on him, to get out of the dark, while also recognizing this time is always filled with pain and suffering.
And while in prison, he has this connection, he writes, with the Spirit of the living God. And he has this supernatural enlightenment, a direct vision while he is in chains, where he experiences and hears the voice of God. Later, he escapes—does some amazing things you could read about in, at the very least, his Wikipedia. And eventually, he writes down this experience he had in prison, and what he sees as a conversation with God. And it became a poem, which would later become the basis for Dark Night of the Soul.
And in response to this psalm, the one we're going to look at in a moment, John points to the opening prayer—the tortured words of the psalmist—as being the very vessel that will propel him towards a stronger faith. He believed that the further you grow in your faith, the more distance from God during seasons you should expect to feel. That mature faith is not an emotional high from Jesus, but instead we often enter into long seasons of dryness and darkness where we feel less emotion, not more. Or simply put—contrary to one's favorite motivational-speaker-type celebrity preacher on the internet—he believed that God is doing some of his best work when we might actually feel the opposite. Like the tide drawing back, he writes: the further it goes out, the stronger it will grow and come back. And if we only stay in a shallow place, we'll feel good, but we'll never grow. That's the book, Dark Night of the Soul.
Here is the psalm that inspired it. Verse 1: "I cried out to God for help; I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands, and I would not be comforted." So our psalm jumps right into the middle of it, as the author here is crying out to God and feeling rejected. And I think that in many ways, this is, at least in my own experience, a perfect picture of spiritual doubt. He writes, I sought the Lord, stretched out my hands, and yet I was not comforted. He is seeking God. He's not rebelling against God. He's seeking God. He believes in God. He has experienced God. And yet, whether genuine or the voice in his head, he also believes that God is not there in this moment.
And he's not alone—not just St. John of the Cross. So many pillars of our faith have experienced this exact same thing. Mother Teresa, in one of her letters, wrote, "Please pray especially for me that I may not spoil his work"—God's work—"and that our Lord may show himself, for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything were dead." In his private journal, C. S. Lewis writes, "Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable. But when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable." And he's, like, feeling tortured, wrestling with this. But even after coming to faith, he still struggles.
Or one more: Martin Luther writes about an experience he had with spiritual doubt. He says, "For more than a week, I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in my entire body. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy of God." He was a pretty intense guy. But still, like, he is feeling this exact same thing that the psalmist is writing.
What we see from some of the most prominent, influential—some of the strongest pillars of our faith, some of the most faithful Christians we know or read or have been influenced by—is many have gone through their own seasons of the dark night of the soul. It's almost like there's a connection there. Doubt is not just a part of your faith. It is also necessary for your faith.
Verse 3 keeps going: "I remembered you, God, and I groaned; I meditated, and my spirit grew faint. You kept my eyes from closing; I was too troubled to speak." Another thing St. John comments on isn't just how we pray—like Asaph is praying to God here—but also why we pray. What is underneath our prayers? Our view of God is often best seen—what we truly believe and know about God—one of the best places to reveal this is how we pray. Is God a priority or an option? Do we only go to God to bail us out, like a parent we call in times of trouble, or when we need help, or are a few bucks short on paying rent that month? Or is he someone we commune with constantly, with no other motivation other than just to spend time with God? Is God a genie or a cosmic vending machine? Or is he a friend, a Savior, a way—the way?
And as we grow in spiritual formation, we learn that praying is not to change the mind of God, but it is to change the heart of the one praying. A maturing believer is one who says, "Your will be done." A mature believer is one who says that and actually wants that. I'm still working on that, often, many times, to confess.
Think about how Paul prays with the disciples. It's rarely about their situation. Or think about that story in Acts, if you're familiar, right? About the earliest disciples who keep getting, like, beaten by the guards because they're talking about Jesus too much. And so they all get together, and their lives are being threatened. And they all get together, they go in the upper room, and they pray. And what do they pray for? They don't pray for their situation. They don't pray that the guards would leave them alone for a minute, or that they could go one day without being beaten. No, they pray for boldness instead. They pray for change to happen, not around them, but in them—so their eyes and hearts can be open to what is happening, what is possible, what is divine.
Please hear, I'm not saying that you are any less of a believer if you are going through something and you pray about that. Quite the opposite. We are told to pray in all things. What I'm saying—what I'm asking all of us—is, do we also pray when we don't want anything? And whether in a joyful season or a season of lament, do we want God, or do we want things from God? Those are not always the same question.
St. John discusses this while comparing a young believer—I would describe as, like, one chasing what I would call the camp-high experience, right? Jesus is my boyfriend or my bodyguard or my homeboy, whatever. Like, I'm-on-cloud-nine type of faith. A young faith that is much more infatuation than devotion. He compares this to an infant crying out for milk. Think of when a baby is hungry or lonely or bored or—a baby, right? How do they communicate this to their parents? They scream as loud as they possibly can. You would think they were injured or in pain. That's just the only way they know how to communicate. But as your kids get older, they eventually maybe just whine a little bit. Your toddler probably doesn't scream as loud as they can when they want a fruit snack, hopefully, right? Then as they get a little older, eventually they let you know they're hungry, you know, with their words, right? Your third grader hopefully doesn't scream in the middle of the night like an infant just to get your attention. But then finally they get to an age when, instead of any of these responses, they simply get to a place where they just wait. Maybe it's high school, young adult years. I have no idea. We are still in the, like, whining-over-anything-that's-not-a-chicken-nugget phase at the Jackson household. Megan and I are still there. But hopefully, eventually, my kids will mature one day, right? And simply trust that they will get fed—fed with all that they need—because they know that Mom and Dad, looking back, have always fed them, and they'll feed me again, right?
But the immature believer—this is St. John; if you've got a problem with it, take it up with him, right?—the immature believer, the one still chasing how God has fed us in the past, he says, is like a newborn screaming for food or attention or an emotional high. And to take this one step further, he writes—and we'll see this later in the psalm—that it's actually a loving thing for a mother to wean a baby off of milk. That at first, the child will see this as uncomfortable, and the child will miss the closeness and intimacy and warmth of the parent and will long for how they ate and were fed in the past. But it's actually a loving thing to put that distance up so that we will soon, one day, be able to experience meat. Hallelujah, right? Or if you're a vegan, I don't know, tofu, or whatever you eat, right? Whatever it is, the point is that a loving God pulls himself away, even if we scream and cry out. He pulls himself away, according to St. John, based on this psalm, from offering milk, so that one day we'll be able to sit at the table and enjoy a feast. The whole time we're crying out, "Why do I feel so far away from God?" And God is saying, "Because I love you."
But back to the warm-bottle days for a moment—the familiarity. Verse 5: "I thought about the former days, the years of long ago; I remembered my songs in the night. My heart meditated and my spirit asked: 'Will the Lord reject me forever? Will he never show his favor again?'" The writer is taking this moment not just to look at the past. He's traveling back to the past in his mind and looking at the present. And he is disappointed in what he sees. His life looks different than it used to. And if yesterday was the standard—if yesterday is what we are chasing after—then it's hard not to be disappointed.
Twenty-five years or so ago, I had just come to faith. And the feelings I had then were very different than the feelings I have today, in many ways. Is it right for me to, quote, "think of the former days" and ask God to take me back to then? Take me back to the type of faith I had in high school on the side of the mountain, right, when I was at camp and I came to faith? What if God wants to take me somewhere new, somewhere else?
And forget faith for a minute. What about other areas of our life? For those of us who are in a relationship—those in the room who are married—do you still feel the exact same way—don't look at them—do you still feel the exact same way about your partner, your spouse, as you did when you were dating? Probably not. This could, of course—negative side—be a sign of neglect or drifting apart. But more than likely, it's also a sign of maturity—growing from infatuation, from liking the idea of a person, to actually falling in love with them.
Or even with ourselves: if the former days are what I'm holding myself to now, as I look back and I'm chasing after that—I have to say, I have a whole lot less energy than I did 25 years ago. I got a lot more gray hairs. I got some more wrinkles on my face. My bones hurt in the morning, right, when I get out of bed—much more than before. And so if the standard for success was the life of the past, I'm not doing so great in life.
And I will admit, when I was going through a season of doubt and deconstruction, these were my exact prayers. Not, "Help me grow in maturity and wisdom." No, it was, "Take me back to the good old days, before I knew better," right? Before I had these questions, when it was new. The point is, me and Asaph and maybe some of you pray, "Lord, I don't want new experiences with you. I want familiar ones."
So the poet looks back and is troubled. He does not see God moving in his life because of what he is expecting that life to look like. This is based on the former years, the songs he sang, it says, the feelings he had. But again, what if God wants to do something new? What if success of yesterday actually looks like failure of today?
For example—just a hypothetical, if I may—imagine for a moment at the end of this year, New Year's Eve, you somehow have this magical moment where you could choose the type of 2027 you are going to have. And you could walk through two doors. I feel like a game show host. You've got two doors that you could walk through, right, which lead to our new lives, at least for the year.
Door number one we'll call the unknown door. And I will warn you, if you choose to walk through this, your 2027 will be unpredictable and at times difficult. And we'll learn a lot, we'll make some mistakes, and we'll gain some new experiences, both good and bad. But in all of these things, all of these experiences, we will have an opportunity to grow closer to God—closer than we've ever been with him before. That's door number one.
Door number two we'll call the predictable door, where your life will look exactly like it looks today. In July of 2027, your life will look exactly like it looks today. Same amount of memories, same experiences, no surprises. Your friendships will look the same. Your experiences, your job, your family, all of it. Your relationship with God will look the same. In fact, you're just going to go back and reenact the entire year one more time. And so January 8, 2027, will look like January 8, 2026, right?
So my question is, which door would you walk through? I think we all know that door number two would actually be terrible. It would be awful—even if you have the best year in the world. If we were the exact person we are today, this would not be something to celebrate. As much as we hate change, we need change. And so in our heads, we know door number one is good for us. However, door number two is tempting—to allow what will eventually become our past to remain our present. That is not God's plan for us.
Let's keep going. Verse 8: "Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion?" When it comes to spiritual maturing—being fully present, learning from the past while not living in it—something the contemplatives, the Desert Fathers, the psalmist, St. John of the Cross all seem to suggest is that one sign of Christian maturity is a season of darkness.
The poem, which would become the book Dark Night of the Soul, talks about two different seasons, two different kinds of darkness. And what is suggested—remember the tide metaphor, going all the way back even further and then coming back stronger, or even the weaning baby—is that when a believer is ready to move into a new season of discipleship, this will often first look like disappointment or darkness or doubt, or what some might call a deconstruction today.
Notice the questions the psalmist is asking here. Has God failed me? Is he angry with me? Is he far from me? What can I even hold on to anymore? It sounds like he's asking. What sometimes is an enlightenment or an illumination sometimes first appears as a darkness. If you've ever stared at the sun—don't do that—but if you ever have, you know that since our eyes cannot hold that level of brightness, it will first look like a darkness if you look at the sun, right? The same is true for the other Son, the Son of God. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust to a season of darkness. And this season of faith—as hard and difficult and at times even scary as it is—can actually lead to something beautiful.
One of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, writes, "You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it." Without verse 9—without the darkness—we wouldn't have verse 10.
Let's keep going. "Then I thought, 'To this I will appeal: the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand. I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds.'" See, now he's looking backwards, but he's not looking at himself anymore. He's not looking at how God used to work. The focus has changed.
Sometimes when we are struggling spiritually, it's because we are focusing on ourselves. But where are the problems, right? The questions are in my own head. How do I think I'm going to intellectually come up with the answers? And so he changes his focus here. Sometimes the best thing we can do when we're feeling far from God is, instead of looking out at God from where we are standing, to instead look at ourselves from where God is positioned—how he sees us.
He keeps going. Verse 13: "Your ways, God, are holy. What god is as great as our God? You are the God who performs miracles; you display your power among the peoples. With your mighty arm you redeemed your people, the descendants of Jacob and Joseph." Now he's moving, notice, into the present tense. It's not "you were holy." No—"your ways are holy." Not "you performed miracles then." No, it's "you perform miracles"—present tense.
And for followers of Jesus, it's important to look at what Jesus did 2,000 years ago. Absolutely. That's what we do every week. We look at what Jesus was doing 2,000 years ago and what God has been doing since the beginning of time. Absolutely. It is important to ask WWJD—thank you, '90s Christian bookstore bracelet, for that, right? Like, it's important to ask, what would Jesus do? But it's also incredibly important to ask, what is Jesus doing today? Whatever that is, how can I be a part of it? That's why we talk about renewal so much here. And if we stare at the past long enough, even while looking for God, it's hard not to get stuck in it.
Let's finish it out. "The waters saw you, God, the waters saw you and writhed; the very depths were convulsed. The clouds poured down water, the heavens resounded with thunder; your arrows flashed back and forth. Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind, your lightning lit up the world; the earth trembled and quaked. Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron." God has done these things, and God is doing something now. God is doing something inside of me, even if I can't see it—even at times if I can't feel it.
So now the psalm is finished here. And we see two ways the author looks back at his past. One with great disappointment—that's the first half of the psalm. God is not who he once was. Looking through the lens of seeing God from our own eyes. The other, which is the second half of the psalm, is looking at us, God's people, through the lens of God—how God has moved in the past, God's will, his plans. We get that beautiful picture of God's reflection over the waters, right? And growth—moving away from the past, or strictly our emotions, or even a logical, palatable faith—is to be in Christ, as the New Testament says. It's a union more than a feeling. It's seeing the dark times as times that God wasn't absent, but often most present.
And sometimes it doesn't always feel this way. I can say this because my mom's not here. Growing up, I got in a lot of trouble, as you guys know. And a few times—many times—when my mom would come and have to bail me out or pick me up, or I got kicked out or suspended, or once at the police station—I remember my mom would pick me up as a teenager, and I would always look over at my mom and I would say, "Mom, do you love me?" My mom would always say the same thing. She would say, "I'll always love you. Right now, I don't like you very much, but I love you." And the thing about it is, if our relationships are built on feelings, on just emotions, then it's going to be really hard to hold on to that. And I knew—I always knew—that my mom loved me, even if she didn't like me in those moments, right? And the same especially can be true with our relationship with God, even when we feel far from God. If that's all our faith is built on, then we're going to be disappointed.
Just a couple of quick takeaways. I've shared some of these before, but they have been incredibly helpful for me in my faith. If you feel stuck with where you are right now, if you feel stuck in your faith, if you can see God's movement in the past but maybe not as clearly now, if you feel like you're in a season of the dark night of the soul—just a couple of ideas.
First, even though you didn't ask for this—most of us don't—recognize that this season can actually be a gift. Paul Tillich writes, "Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith." See your dark season as an opportunity, as an invitation for growth. If you've known someone who has been married for a very long time—for many of them, if you ask them, the times that they felt the closest in their marriage, in their relationship, were not always when everything was great and hunky-dory, as they say. For many of them, it was actually when they went through something hard that they felt closer to that person. And the difference between the couple who grows because of difficulty versus the couple who doesn't—the difference between the ones who grow better instead of growing bitter—the difference is how much they lean on each other. It's the difference between me versus you, and me and you versus the problem, whatever it is we're going through. And the same is true about God. As hard and at times counterintuitive as it feels, invite God into your doubt. "God, I can't do this alone." It's, instead of seeing you as the problem in my faith and doubt, how about, "God, help me, meet me in my faith and my doubt"? And so just because you are in a dark night of the soul, that doesn't mean you have to sit alone.
Second thing, which has been helpful—I've shared this a million times; I'll share it again—start a prayer journal. Do it on your phone. Go to the dollar store, get a little journal, and just at the end of the night or the end of the week or whatever it is, just write down your prayers. It could be one word. It could be something—and just write the date next to it. And if God is answering one of your prayers, this forces me to take a moment and just thank God. Because so often I'll pray and pray and pray about something, for months sometimes, and then it gets resolution, and God steps into that, whatever that looks like. And I'm like, "Thank you, God. Okay, on to the next one," right? And this forces me to take a moment. But here's the best part: you can actually turn back to it, like the psalmist does, especially during difficult times. Look at all the ways that God has been faithful before, especially when you feel distant from him now.
Third thing: if you are in the former half of the psalm, during a difficult time in the dark, simply follow someone who can see clearly. Years ago, I went cave exploring, mostly because I was in my early 20s, and that's when you do dumb things. And so I was young, and we decided to go exploring a cave. And I'll never forget—I was with a friend, and halfway through, we were, like, pretty far deep into this cave—halfway through, my headlamp went out. And I thought I knew what darkness was before, until you're in the middle of a cave. And it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. And everywhere I bumped, I just felt like the walls were closing in on me. And I called out to my friend, and eventually he found me, and he led me out. He got in front of me, we turned around, and I had to just hold his backpack, and he led me out of this cave. And I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I probably would have died, to be honest. But I don't know what I would have done without him.
Likewise, when I was going through a season of doubt and deconstruction, I don't know what I would have done without my community. And so, if that is where you are, find a friend, a spiritual director, a therapist, a community group, whoever it is—just find someone who is not in a season of darkness, someone holding the lamp saying, "I've been there before. I know the way. It's going to be all right." When you are in the dark, find someone who can see clearly.
And lastly, one of the places you can turn is actually the Psalms. I felt like I was tossed a life jacket in the middle of a storm when I discovered the Psalms when I was going through this. Take comfort in knowing that the very human hands and hearts that God used to write down his love letter to the world were made up of people who at times literally were questioning him—and at times even his existence. And the best part is, God allowed those questions and doubts into his Word. It's almost like he knew we would need them.
And so wherever you are now in your faith—whether you've gone through a dark night of the soul, you're on the other side of it, or you know that one day you might be there—just remember, the opposite of faith isn't doubt. Doubt is an element of faith. The opposite of faith is actually certainty. And the truth is, doubt is actually not a dark room, even if it feels that way; it's actually a window to something better.
I'll close with this—one more quote. Frederick Buechner, on his own search for answers, had this epiphany. He says, "Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me." And thank the Lord we worship the God who not only has room for us; he also has room for our questions, our fear, our desires, our doubts, our anger, our laments, all of it. But the worst thing we could ever do is feel like we need to figure those things out on our own before we turn to God, when in reality it's through God that we'll actually find a way out. Let's pray.
Lord, help us to be present, while seeing your goodness and faithfulness of today and tomorrow and yesterday. My prayer is not to take me back, nor to take me to what's next, but for now I pray simply for you to again meet us where we are. And Lord, I have learned that so often when I feel far from you, looking back, it's almost always one of two reasons. One is because it's me, and I'm the one who has moved—moved away from you, or moved towards something else. Often moved towards my own ego, my own selfishness, towards sin, which at the time seems more enticing than you. Often the distance I experience is the steps that I have taken. But other times, I have learned—as I look back at my faith and look at all the ways that you have moved—I have learned what our psalm reveals: that this distance we feel from you is actually a gift. It's an opportunity for growth. That the distance we feel is you leading us in a new direction. I see this picture of a parent teaching their child to walk. And with each step back, they're creating distance between them and their little one—not to get away from their son or their daughter, but actually to encourage them to move more and more in the right direction. And so, as the old hymn says, Lord, illuminate our steps. Give us just enough light that, while in the dark, we can see our next step, so that we won't feel lost. But Lord, as much as I want it at times, don't give us too much light, or we will feel like we don't need you anymore. Continue to lead us in the dark and through the dark, because you are the true light. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.