The Years With the Light Off

He has a phrase for it and he has never once explained the phrase to anybody, which is how you know it is doing work.

The dark part. As in: yeah, that was during the dark part. He says it lightly, and people accept it, because everybody has a stretch and nobody wants to be the one who asks.

Five years. He can tell you exactly when it started, because of a phone call, and he can tell you roughly when it stopped, because he noticed one morning about eighteen months in that he had noticed something, and then it took another three years for that to become a life again.

What happened in it is his business and it is going to stay his business. What matters here is a thing he has never said out loud and only worked out this evening, sitting on the rocks above the water with a cold thermos cup in his hand, watching the sea do the copper thing it does when the sun is nearly gone.

He assumed God was not there.

Not decided. Assumed, which is much worse, because a decision can be revisited and an assumption just sits underneath everything and quietly organizes it. He never once prayed about the dark part, not during it and not since. When he came back to faith afterward he came back to the part of his life that started after, and the five years sat outside, in the way a room that got flooded once gets closed off and the family stops walking through it.

He is forty three. He is on a rock he has sat on since he was a kid, and the light is going, and he has just noticed that he has never taken those five years anywhere.

Not to God, not to a person, not even properly to himself.

The water is going from copper to that gray that comes right after. Somebody's dog is a long way down the beach. And he is sitting with a phrase that has been doing a job for him for a decade, which is to keep a room shut.

You have that room. You may not call it the dark part. You may not call it anything, which is its own kind of naming. And the years in it are not the trouble. The trouble is the assumption you laid over them without noticing, and there is a psalm that goes at exactly that assumption and takes it apart in one line.

Both alike to Him

I have to be careful here, and more careful than usual, because there is a version of this that arrives with a reason for five years. God was working. It was refining. There was a purpose in it. I am not going to say any of that. Scripture does not explain his dark part, and inventing an explanation and putting God's name on it would be worse than saying nothing.

What Scripture does is different and it goes at the assumption rather than at the years.

David runs through every place a person could get to, in Psalm 139, and finds each one occupied. Heaven, and the grave. The wings of the morning, and the uttermost parts of the sea. And then he tries the last one, which is not a place at all but a condition: If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee (Psalm 139:11-12).

Both alike. Not He can manage in the dark. Not He comes in and finds you eventually. There is no difference to Him between the two, and therefore there is no such thing as a stretch of your life He was navigating with difficulty.

You were never in a room He could not see into. That is not a soft reading of the psalm; Psalm 139:12 says both alike to thee and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line put the darkness and the day on exactly level terms so that nobody could quietly file five years as unattended.

And notice what David is doing in the verse before it. He is trying to hide. Surely the darkness shall cover me. It is not a comfort he is reaching for, it is a cover, and the answer he gets is that the cover does not work, and by the end of the psalm he has stopped experiencing that as a threat.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:12

The assumption did the damage, not the dark

Now the actual mechanics of the last ten years, because this is where it bites.

The five years were what they were. He came out of them. People do. What has been running since, quietly, is a sentence he never examined: God was not in that, so that part of me is not covered.

And a man who believes that will bring God the finished parts of his life. He will pray about work and about his knee. He will not pray about the room that got flooded, because he has already concluded, without evidence, that the room is outside the property.

You have never had a section of your life outside the coverage. Romans 8:38 says nothing in death, nothing in life, nothing present, nothing to come, no height, no depth, nor any other creature can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and Paul lists depth on purpose; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) was in the depth with you.

This is yours right now, on a rock above the water: five years that are already inside the boundary. Psalm 139:8 says that if he makes his bed in hell, God is there, and the psalmist chose the worst word available and still found the place occupied; the Spirit who inspired that verse has been in that closed room the entire time.

What he is actually afraid of

Let me name the sentence under the phrase, because it is not shame about what happened.

It sounds like this: if I open it, I will find out that He really was not there, and then I will have lost the years and the ground under everything since. That is the fear. It is why the phrase stays a phrase, and it has never been said to a single person.

You were held through all five, and the holding did not require you to be aware of it. Isaiah 43:2 says when you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and the promise is presence and not commentary; the Holy Spirit who carried that into the book was there on the days he could not have told you what month it was.

Fruit is not output, and five closed years are where the seam shows. Output is what could be listed from that time, and there is nothing to list, and he would tell you so. Fruit is what grew on a man who kept getting up through a stretch he still cannot describe, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that longsuffering, and it does not appear anywhere he could point to.

And I am not going to tell you those years were for something. I do not know why they went the way they went. What can be said, and only this, is that the dark was not dark to Him and that He did not need the light on to be in the room.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the walk you already take, tell Him about one ordinary day out of those five years. Not the worst one. An ordinary one. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. That is a branch sitting in a vine, and nobody grades it.