God & the Thick Darkness

There’s this weird little line in Exodus 20…

But before we get to it, don’t let me give you the wrong idea. I’m not doing a lot of Bible reading these days. 

In fact, I’ve had days where I’ve been an atheist 3 times before lunch only to have my faith brought back by seemingly small, insignificant things. That said…

I wrote a reflection on a verse in Exodus 20 about 6 months prior to leaving ministry, when I had no clue my life was about to get turned upside down.

During that transition this line stuck in my head, and brought me a lot of comfort in the months and days leading up to and following me leaving ministry.

If you’re in the spot, or have been in that spot, maybe it will for you too. 

If you don’t know the story behind Exodus 20, here’s the TLDR: 

The newly-liberated Israelites have spent years wandering the desert, following God in the form of a bright pillar of fire, hoping that he’d do what he said he would and lead them to a new home. 

And one day, the mountain they’re camped at the base of becomes covered by clouds and thunder and lighting and deep black smoke. So much so that “the smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace”

It’s easy to lose the imagery here, so imagine yourself in that ancient desert.

You have no home. No sense of belonging.

You’re living day by day in a desert with nothing but what you can carry, led along by a God you barely know.

And now the mountain you’ve camped at the base of is covered in the thunder and lighting and smoke. 

And, in the middle of this fear and chaos comes this line:

“The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.”

Let me read that again,

“Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.”

One more time… 

“the thick darkness where God was.”

More often than not we imagine God’s presence as being synonymous with light.

We think of “darkness” as a moral thing, some sort of evil. But that’s not what’s going on here…

In the ancient world, darkness meant you couldn’t see. There was no electricity, and oil or wood to burn was scarce. So you did your work and lived your life by what could be seen by the naked eye, in the light of day.

And yet, where is God?

Not in the convenient, obvious light but in “the thick darkness.”

Not in the known but the unknown. 

Not in the certainty, but the uncertainty. 

Not where you can rely on your senses, but where sense fail and you cannot see. 

God is waiting for his people in the thick darkness.

Every great spiritual pilgrimage story involves stepping into uncertainty, into the unknown. It seems like that’s where God likes to spend his time. 

And at the risk of giving you a Sunday sermon…

The same is true for us. It is at the edge of safety and certainty and clarity that God waits for us. 

For me, leaving ministry was a move toward a thick darkness. All the plans, all the clarity, all of my sense of self was being left behind.

I mean it when I said I had no idea what was ahead of me. I still don’t. 

And so I’ve tried holding onto strange hope that maybe God is in that darkness. 

Now, don’t get the idea that I was a Moses here. I did everything in my power to minimize the time spent in darkness. But it stuck around. 

It’s much easier to let God be the golden-calf of a god we can understand. It’s much harder to be in the darkness where God actually is, unsure we’ll ever come out. 

Yet, leaving ministry forced me to walk through and linger in the darkness…

Unsure of my career, my calling, my faith, my god, my plans, and my self.

I wrote in that reflection a few years back: 

“For many of us our instinct is to stay where things are clear. Where things are certain and safe and we can control and run our lives. That’s my tendency for sure. 

Yet I wonder if more often than not God is waiting for us where our senses fail and trust begins, in the uncertainty and mystery. If we stay where things are certain and clear, or where we can reduce God down to tidy answers or mediate him through others experience, do we run the risk of missing God altogether?”

A few years removed from ministry, my faith looks different. 

I don’t find God in the phrases of carefully crafted sermons very often anymore. But I do find him when I look at the sea, as if he was waiting there all along.

I don’t see God in my plans, but I sense we’re brushing shoulders when I play with my kids. 

I don’t have neat answers anymore, but underpinning my questions is a sense that God still might be holding my life. 

And perhaps most surprising of all, on the other side of darkness has been a truly beautiful and full life. And that has made led me to believe that maybe somehow, in the middle of all that pain and depression and uncertainty and wrestling… in the middle of that thick darkness, God was there after all. 

-Collin