Hope in the night

Where can I go from your Spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.  If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.  If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for the darkness is as light to you. --Psalm 139:7-12

Charlotte Bronte said, "The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely."  Mother Theresa said, "The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved."  Hank Williams, Sr. sang, "I'm so lonesome I could die."

We've all been there.  We've all been isolated, either physically, or perhaps psychologically.  We've all been so far out of touch that we think even God has left us.  But our Scripture today reminds us that wherever we are, God has been there all the time.  The psalm writer tries to think of the highest highs and the lowest lows. What can be higher than heaven?  We know that God is there.  If we try to imagine the lowest place possible--Death Valley; death and the grave; going through hell itself--even there you cannot go where God is not.

What if we find ourselves in a place where nobody knows us?  Say you have been transferred to another city, or maybe another country, and you feel like nobody there cares whether you live or die.  Maybe you feel imprisoned, either literally or figuratively.  Many times in the Old Testament the Children of Promise were taken into exile into foreign lands.  Can you imagine being sold into slavery, and ending up on another continent?  Maybe you can.  But the psalmist's words of hope ring true: if I go as far to the East as the sunrise, or as far to the West as the Pacific Ocean, God is already there.  He's like a Dad, always there to hold our hand when we need comfort or guidance.

I have two children, a boy and a girl.  My son has always been fearless.  There were times when I wished he was holding my hand, so he could stay out of harm's way.  My daughter, however, has always been afraid. She was afraid of the dinosaur exhibits at the Museum of Science and History.  She was deathly afraid of Chuck E. Cheese, the mouse mascot at the pizza chain.  And if we had taken her into a cavern and the guide had shut off the lights for a moment, not only would she have grabbed my hand and held it for dear life, she would have crawled up my leg!  God wants us to reach out to him, to know he is there for us, just like we are there for our children.

So many times we find ourselves in the pit of despair.  In our depression we see no light at all, only impending gloom.  It is then that we need Jesus the most.  And he is there, even if you do not see him.  1 John 1:5 says, "This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all."  We all have heard that God is Light.  But in Genesis 1 we see that the first thing God created was light.  In the eternity that was before creation, was there no light?  Perhaps not as we perceive it. Scientists have shown that humans can perceive less than 1.5% of the total light spectrum.  When we get to heaven, we will be able to see things we have never seen.  We will be able to see God as we have never seen him before.  This is what the psalmist may have meant when he said, "even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for the darkness is as light to you."  God does not know darkness, because his very nature is light.

Think about that during your darkest hours.  My son spent last winter in Alaska.  Depending on how far north you go, the night can last 20 hours or more.  When clouds obscure the moon and stars, it gets pretty lonely.  You can lose hope very quickly.  Nearly every drugstore in Alaska stocks sun lamps, so that people can experience not just artificial light but full spectrum light in the dead of winter.

Maybe the darkness you see is storm clouds on the horizon.  Perhaps you are in the middle of one of life's darkest storms.  This morning God brought a hymn to my mind.  I haven't sung it in years--most current worship services stay away from hymns, especially ones first published in 1836.  But the words to "The Solid Rock" were brought to mind this morning.  Not the uplifting chorus, or the cheery first verse.  Rather, the second and third verses, that speak of storms and floods:

When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.

His oath, His covenant, His blood
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.

When we know God's presence in those most difficult circumstances, then and only then can we truly know what the hymn writer meant when he said,

 On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; 

All other ground is sinking sand,

All other ground is sinking sand.