Dark Night of The Soul

This morning, in my devotional reading, I came across the phrase "dark night of the soul."  I immediately thought of someone who appears to be living there right now.  My first thought was, "I can only imagine what this individual life is like."  But my next thought was, "I absolutely can do more than imagine, I lived for months in the dark night of the soul."

I was diagnosed as "Unipolar," and told it was "an adult onset of clinical depression."  Whatever label the medical community would like to use, it was a dark night of the soul.  I felt estranged from God, worthy of condemnation and loathed the very thought of facing another day.  All joy, all hope, all desire other than an end to the pain was gone.  Each day I longed for the night so I could close my eyes and shut out the world.  Each night I prayed it would end and dreaded the coming of another day.

Many of you will have a hard time understanding the depth of this darkness and 20% of you will know precisely what I'm talking about.  Nonetheless, it is real, it is dark and there appears to be no way out, no way forward, nothing but pain and sorrow and regret.  You feel worthless and condemned and that God has rightly turned his back on you.  And, you could not be more wrong!

You are living a lie hosted by the "father of lies" (Satan, Jn 8:44).  This is the devil's aim.  He is not interested in keeping you out of church or keeping you from believing in God, "even the demons believe" (Js 2:19).  He desires to keep you from having joy in the Lord, from being a life-filled testimony to God's love in Christ.  You can be as religious as you may be and be in church "every time the doors are open" but Satan won't even flinch as long as your heart is not open, as long as your joy is not evident.

Your darkness, your pain, keeps you from being able to share the hope of the cross.  All that can be seen in you is the pain of your own self-crucifying mental outlook.  Being hopeless, you have no hope to share.  Being lifeless, you have no life to share.  Being joyless, you have no joy to share.  All you have to share is life-sucking, joy-sucking, hope-sucking dark night of the soul.

You have nothing good to share and no ability to receive anything good.  There is no good news for you and no good word for others.  The only laughter in your life is the sick, twisted laughter of the father of lies, "the god of this age [who has] blinded [us, so that we] cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Cor 4:4).

While you may need medical intervention to help you get past the chemical changes in your body, if you are clinically depressed, there is ultimately only one way to dispel the darkness: Step into the Light.  Darkness cannot exist where light shines and such a light is shining for all who will accept the Lord's invitation to come into the light for "the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned" (Mt 4:16).

There is only one ultimate answer: Come to Jesus and lay everything at his feet.  Hold nothing back.  Seek nothing else.  Like the apostle Paul, who faced such darkness in his life, we need to "consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus [our] Lord, for whose sake [we] have lost all things, considering them garbage, that [we] may gain Christ" (Phil 3:8).  Jus' Say'n.