I woke up muttering my dismay at not having an approved regulation pillow stack. After a week of this goofiness my wife very patiently and wisely suggested that I just use the pillows as pillows and not media for secret messages and just sleep.
The whole process was tiring, frustrating and confusing from analyzing too much. I was trying to sleep by my cleverness and ability to think logically.
I write this partly because I've been reading through the classic book "Dark Night of the Soul". It describes a condition Christians can find themselves in where their communication with God is disrupted or even broken.
One occasion which produces this silence from God is described this way. In Hosea 5:15-6:3 we see God responding to a lifestyle of ignoring Him and His ways. God breaks the communication and effectively hides Himself.
"I will go away and return to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me."
"Come, let us return to the Lord, for He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him."
"So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord."
Everything seems dark and despairing. Nothing seems right no matter how we struggle to know Him.
If God seems missing or far away it might be time for you to repent and run; run like crazy back to God and He will restore the relationship!
But there are times when you haven't been all that depraved. You've read your Bible faithfully, gone to two Bible studies a week, had long and serious prayer times and yet God remains a mystery.
The reputable Christian Mystics remind us that it is Gods way to hide from His people on occasion; Especially the genuinely spiritually mature. Whats up with that?
The reason is that although God has given us a mind to vigorously use to know Him, there are truths unknowable. A strong relationship between two people depends on knowing each other for having spent time with each other learning the otherwise unknowable about them.
C S Lewis uses a different metaphor. He discusses the difference between someone who has carefully studied a map of an area of the world. Your neighborhood for example. He might be able to tell you the relative locations of your house and the convenience store. But who really knows the area the map reader or you. You live there, have seen the sights, possibly know the neighbors.
Put it this way - who would you want as a guide to Yosemite National Park... a map expert who has never been there or someone who vacations there every summer. Of course you want the person who has stood in the valley and seen Half Dome or El Capitan or Yosemite falls. The one who has smelled the smells and seen the sights and walked the trails.
God desires to have a relationship based on personal interaction, not mutual study. He does not want to be a god of paper and ink found in books.
At the end of the story of Job, after Job endures a great many troubles, Job addresses God and says, more or less, "Before I had heard about you, now I know you."
The Dark Night of the Soul is dark because God wants us to know Him because we have been told by Him. He wants our hearts to be filled with Joy because He is here. We share secrets. He will give us each a new name that only He knows. We sit and stare quietly at Him in His presence because He is delighted we are there!
The Dark Night of the Soul is hard; it's confusing, it can be discouraging, it goes against our nature to want to have reasoned it out ourselves. It is the way to Him for anyone, there is no one who cannot simple respond in joyous love and wonder. Think of a newborn baby's responses to familiar faces. It is eternal life.
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