When I Sit In Darkness

Six o'clock. She knows without checking, because there is a particular quality to six that is different from five, and she has had a great deal of practice.

The room is dark. Not fully. There is the edge of the curtain doing what it does and there is the standby light on something in the corner, and there is a stripe under the door from the hall she never turns off.

She is not asleep and she is not getting up.

That used to be a fight. There was a period, longer than she likes to think about, where six o'clock was a negotiation, with rules and counting and a series of methods she had read about, and she was quite good at some of them for a while.

The fight is over. That is the actual news of this morning, and it is not dramatic and there is nobody to tell. She has run out of methods. She lies there and the sentence goes past like a train she is not going to catch: there is no way for me to get out of this bed, and there is no point pretending there is one.

You know this room. It might be six, or it might be four, or it might be the middle of an afternoon. Somewhere there is a place you cannot get yourself out of, and the worst part is not the place. The worst part is the day you stopped believing you had a method.

Two clauses, and neither of them belongs to you

There is a sentence in a small prophet, spoken by somebody sitting in exactly this, and it is built out of two halves that people usually separate and should not.

Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.Micah 7:8

When I fall, I shall arise. People quote that half as though it were a boast about resilience, and if you stop there it becomes another demand. But the sentence does not stop there. The second half explains the first: the arising happens because the Lord is the light, in the dark, where the sitting is happening.

And notice the tense of the sitting. Not when I sat. Not once I get up. When I sit in darkness is present and ongoing. The prophet is still in it while he says the whole thing.

You are one that God arises, and He is the light in a room where you are still sitting, at six in the morning, with the curtain edge and the standby lamp. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft thing I chose for a difficult morning, and the Holy Spirit who is in you right now, awake, is the evidence that the light in that room has never been something you had to generate.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic that goes past like a train. If the arising is His, then a morning with no method in it is information about how long this has gone on and how much has been asked of you. It is not information about your character, and it never had the standing to become that.

The end of your methods is not the end of you

Here is the second thing, and it is the whole reason this page exists.

Every method you tried was somebody's kind attempt to hand you a lever. Put your feet on the floor first. Count backwards. Open the curtain before anything else. And each one worked for a while, and each one eventually joined the list of things that used to work, and the list itself has become the heaviest object in the room.

The end of the list is not a verdict. It is where a large number of God's people have been lying since Micah, and He has never once required a lever.

You have been carried through every one of these mornings, and the carrying did not weaken on the day the last method stopped working. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than standing at the end of the bed waiting for a technique to be applied.

And say this too, plainly: mornings that go like this, over months, are worth telling a doctor about. That is not a failure of faith. Very often it is the shape God's help takes.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a gentle thought in a dark room. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not thought about at six in the morning for a year. And the thing in the way is not the bed and it is not the hour. It is a sentence: there is no point pretending there is a way. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a person with any authority lying still in the dark. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself was behind them.

If these mornings have taken you somewhere darker than tiredness, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.