Psalm 30 Part I: The Dark Night of Growth
Sing to the Lord, you saints of his. Praise his holy name. For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. Psalm 30:4-5
The phrase, “Weeping may remain for a night but joy comes in the morning,” has stayed with me as the best description of what our hearts can feel as we face uncertainty and change. This might include losses, unexpected decisions, or events that come along we never thought would happen to us. But through them, we discover that God uses the darkness to show his love.
This may seem like a strange thing to say, but it can also be the only way we have of making sense of our circumstances. We go through a sort of process of elimination by thinking about what we know is true. God is love, and he will never leave us. So, if we believe that, it means God is present in our dark times, and he loves us through our dark times. But we wonder where he is because often we can’t see him.
Think of a summer thunderstorm that comes up in the night. We know how storms are formed with high anvil tops and puffy, white clouds. If the storm were to come through in the daylight, we’d see the size and color of the clouds. We’d see the wind bend the trees. We’d see the haze of the pouring rain.
But at night, the darkness hides all that. It doesn’t mean the clouds aren’t as big and puffy, or the rain is less heavy. The storm was still there. It moved through, but with less evidence of its power. If it comes late enough in the night, we might miss it completely, except for random rumbles of thunder or flashes of lightning.
Even these, as impressive as they are, don’t provide the accurate measure of the power of the storm. The only proof we may ever see of its existence is in the morning when we step outside and discover sparkly raindrops on the grass or damp pavement long after the storm has moved on.
God works this way in our lives. He moves through with power and with great love, but we don’t see the evidence of his presence because he is hidden by the darkness of grief or of growth, or of death. We may not even realize he has been there until long after his work is done. Then we look around in awe and utter, “Surely God was in this place.” An echo of Jacob’s experience in Genesis after he’d received a vision.
After the thunderstorm moves through, the corn’s growth rate accelerates. It climbs to greater height and develops kernels. Even in the dark.
A Carmelite monk from Spain names John of the Cross lived during the 1500’s. He wrote a book called The Dark Night of the Soul. In this book, he described how God works in our souls not through joy and light, but through sorrow and darkness. This dark night can be a time of suffering, but it can also be a time of growth.
John of the Cross says the dark night of the soul is when a person loses all the pleasure they once experienced in their spiritual life. this happens because God wants to purify them and move them on to greater heights.
These dark nights don’t come upon us through anything we have done. These seasons of purification and growth are appointed by God in their own time, and for our good. They can feel strenuous and overwhelming, causing us to wonder if we have strayed off track or if we have offended God. We might ask, “Why has he stepped away from me, or why don’t I hear from him as much as I used to?”
In the darkness, God is taking away all our sinful habits so that he can create his holy life within us. No soul will ever grow deep in the spiritual life unless God works passively in that soul by means of the dark night.
The darkness can make us wonder if God is angry. The Bible has much to say about God’s anger, otherwise known as his wrath. But for our conversation here, I’d like to highlight verses from Psalm 103.
Verse 8 says the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Verse 9 says he will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever. Verse 10 says he does not deal with us according to our iniquities.
King David, who wrote Psalm 30, had gone through his own dark night at some point. He’d been fighting a battle. The fight included enemies, and a fall into a low, deep place like a grave. He’d been injured and he’d been in danger, as implied in other verses by his call to God for help.
Whatever David’s situation was, it held a real threat of death, the low grave as his destiny, and the triumph of his enemies. He knows that without God’s intervention, he will come out the loser and probably die.
Have you ever had a night of restless sleep or maybe of no sleep? You try to relax and get comfortable but sleep just won’t come. Our minds stay busy with a worrisome problem, or our bodies feel pain that prevents us from settling down and resting. The hours on the clock tick by.
The darkness seems to last much longer than it should, and we wonder if morning will ever come. When the sky finally starts to lighten, we feel a sense of relief. We made it. We survived that whole dark, long night. Now morning has come. We can get help, see the doctor, or rely on our supportive relationships. Struggle and pain can make us feel stuck. Once we find a resolution, we can finally start to move on.
David had first-hand experience with the love of God. The anger came at necessary times of wrongdoing, but it doesn’t define David’s relationship with him. David sees himself always as a favored one, someone who gets special treatment and large doses of unsolicited attention from the Heavenly Father. It’s the nature of God’s interaction with him. David doesn’t expect anything different. He knows God as the one who cares about him and helps him. The one who is always on his side.
The apostle Paul says therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So, we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Hold onto your hope because at some point, those first rays of sunlight will crack through the clouds. Dawn will arrive bringing with it the sunrise. Weeping may remain for a night, but it will end. The morning will replace it, bringing rejoicing.
