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Journeying with the Spirit -part 7 of 8

Today.

My church has come undone and I am essentially unemployed.

I feel I am in a lost and dark place. For me, at this time, journeying with the Spirit is not about an external destination or activity. It is about a waiting.

There is movement in this waiting, but the movement is not toward the light. It is in fact toward the darkness.

“Clouds and thick darkness surround him,”  says the psalmist.

For me, in this season of my life, to journey with the Spirit is to walk toward the darkness; the mystery; the unknowing.

Like Peter on the mount of transfiguration, the cloud has overshadowed me and I am terrified.

But Jesus is in the cloud. And in it I hear God’s voice. It’s a whisper, but it is clear and it reminds me that only Jesus’ most intimate friends are invited to join him in the cloud.

So I wait and I listen.

If you find yourself in Spirit-led darkness, don’t try to get out of it. Trust it. Wait there. It is in the cloud where Jesus is revealed.

(Part 8 will follow in my next post.)

2 thoughts on “Journeying with the Spirit -part 7 of 8”

  1. Dark night of the soul; I lay in bed, awoken at 3AM by my racing heart, I was filled with something akin to fear but more like nothingness. I was facing the end of my life’s work, the profession that I thought God had called me to the sacrifices I had made in terms of a long commute, time away from my children and now I had been told my work was not good enough, I was not good enough to have an academic job at a UC school. Strangely, I felt empty, not sad really, just black, devoid of feeling. I thought that this must be what it feels like to be far from God, without hope; the way souls in limbo might feel. Why did God allow me to wake to this when I felt so low anyway why did He show me the emptiness of my soul? I could not find a way out, no thoughts of children, love, Him could penetrate this emptiness. I could not manufacture a way out. Is this what death is like? He gave me a miracle: Andrei had come home early from a meeting, thinking that I would be broken up about the news (though I swore I didn’t need him to come home) and the sound of his breathing, his warmth gave my mind a spot of yellow.

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