Day 13 (3/3)
Day 13 (3/3): Holding On in the Dark
Scripture Reading: Jonah 2:1-6
Written by Beth Patterson
1 From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. 2 He said:
“In my distress I called to the Lord,
and he answered me.
From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,
and you listened to my cry.
3 You hurled me into the depths,
into the very heart of the seas,
and the currents swirled about me;
all your waves and breakers
swept over me.
4 I said, ‘I have been banished
from your sight;
yet I will look again
toward your holy temple.’
5 The engulfing waters threatened me,
the deep surrounded me;
seaweed was wrapped around my head.
6 To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my God,
brought my life up from the pit.
What was it like for Jonah for those three days in the belly of the large fish? We really don’t know. We know that he prayed, but what else did he do? How did he experience the belly of that fish? I imagine it was disorienting to Jonah… and smelly. Mostly, though, I imagine that it was dark. Pitch black dark.
Life can feel pitch black dark sometimes, can’t it? We may not be in the belly of a big fish, but we may be in a dark place emotionally, relationally or physically. The darkness of a diagnosis or broken relationship can be scary, but it can also be clarifying. In darkness, we may need to slow down, wait, hold on, and listen. Things simplify in the dark. We sometimes just have to be.
In these moments of darkness, let’s be assured that darkness falls on us, but never on God. He is never overwhelmed by darkness. In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor describes how her once-averse stance toward darkness softened as she realized that she learned life-giving things in the dark that she would never have learned in the light. And God? “Darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.” Isn’t this good news?
What have you learned in darkness? How has God been a Light in your dark times?