True You By Michelle DeRushaSample

Day Five: The Dark Night

Scripture: Hebrews 10:19-23

When we acknowledge our deepest brokenness, we acknowledge our fullest, deepest selves—our whole selves. And it is only when we present that self—stripped naked, 100 percent whole and true—that we are truly able to meet God and allow ourselves to be held by his love. God doesn’t want just the best parts of ourselves—he desires the worst parts of ourselves too—the parts we despise, the parts we are afraid of, the parts we most want to hide. He even wants the part of us that doesn’t have faith or trust in him.

Letting go and allowing ourselves to fall headlong into the dark abyss is the beginning of our grounding in God. In short, we have to fall before we land. This is, as theologian Richard Rohr says, “the ultimate paradox of the God experience: ‘falling into the hands of the living God’ (Heb. 10:31).” 

Most of us are so familiar with Paul’s tremendous contributions to Christianity, we forget that before he became St. Paul he had to be forcibly and painfully turned by God toward God. That frightening experience on the road to Damascus and the three harrowing days of darkness, hunger, and thirst that followed was Paul’s literal and figurative dark night of the soul (Acts 8:1-19).

Paul was forced to face his deepest brokenness and walk through it and out the other side. We all have a shadow side—some aspects of yourself that are not aligned with God’s vision for you. Confronting your false self and naming it is a necessary and critical part of deep transformation. Though it doesn’t feel like it in the moment, the dark night is the opening into a deeper, more authentic union with God. The loneliness, fear, and sense of abandonment you feel during the dark night is the result of the stripping and emptying, but it is also this stripping and emptying that creates the space for God to enter in.

The dark night of the soul is the pivot point, the most critical moment on the journey toward uncovering and discovering your true self. The hard prune, allowing yourself to be cut back to your basic, most essential framework, opens the way for the first tender shoot to sprout from old wood.

Will you accept God’s invitation to let go of the last handhold? Will you allow yourself to be turned, or will you require a forcible intervention?