Finding God in the night.
In the shadow the pandemic, we likely see the things in our lives very differently than a few months ago. A lot may have changed for you personally and in your world. How God is at work may seem different; your prayer may seem different; your desires. Many things will have taken a hard left turn—some will have seemed suddenly to drop off and vanish: hopes, discernment, progress. So much landscape has changed.
How do we make sense of this?
In The Song of the Bird, Anthony De Mello, tells a parable:
A neighbor found Nasruddin on hands and knees.“What are you searching for, Mullah?”“My key.”Both men got on their knees to search. After a while the neighbor said, “Where did you lose it?”“At home.”“Good Lord! Then why are you searching here?”“Because it’s brighter here.”
De Mello comments simply,”Search for God where you lost him.”
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When I lose the thread with God and the direction I was leaning into has stopped yielding fruit, has dried up or becomes blocked, my first instinct is to abandon it. Surely I’ve gotten it wrong, I think. Or I stayed on the trail too long; I missed the next turn God was pointing me to. Worse, maybe I spoiled it somehow, and the invitation I heard, God took back, and I’m left without a way forward. Where did I lose Him?
“Here!” I think, Now!” as I frantically search myself like one looking for their keys and scramble for some light to see by. Yet instead of retracing my steps, I’ll abandon my path to wander until I find the comfort of something that makes sense again: a new idea, a new direction, a new mission. Is this where I lost Him?
No. I lost Him the dark, in nightfall.
Where did you lose your keys? Probably not where you realized they were missing but where you last saw them. Look for them where you lost them, not where you want them to be. And where we can’t find them with our eyes, groping in the dark, we may simply know that they haven’t vanished, that if we wait, a light may return to uncover them again. Even more, that they’re not lost to us at all—and that God is in that darkened place, under those shadows too.
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In Mark 4, Jesus also tells a parable about what may or may not be found without light to see by:
The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.
God is at work even in darkness. I might go so far to suggest, God does most of God’s under the cover of night.
What was last clear to you before you lost clarity? How might God still be at work among those threads that seem lost now?
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The pandemic has cast a shadow over many of our lives, and while we talk of a “new normal,” there is much that simply isn’t normal. Some things will change forever, certainly. And many things will pass with this long and strange night. We may see our landscape, inwardly and outwardly, radically change again by daylight and how it was altogether unchanged by the night’s shadow. All the more so if we remain where we lost Him and wait for clarity or love.