On the outside you may continue to function as always, little difference perceptible by anyone else. You live out your days in front of others as you always have, yet this other life in you is happening unbeknownst to everyone else. Yet you are in or are entering a dark night.
Have you been through a dark night before? How do you know it’s a dark night? There are a few signs that may indicate this is a holy and dark night orchestrated by God for your spiritual growth.
You may be in a dark night:
1. When a situation or circumstance turns bad, or ugly in its own way and with your every attempt to deal with it, by explanation, defence, justice, even mercy, it doesn’t help. It only seems to make it worse.
2. When your prayers go continually unanswered and heaven seems to be closing itself to you. The heavens are as brass and you are left to yourself to deal with an impossible situation.
3. The situation defies logic and can’t seem to be figured out. Scriptures don’t apply, the well meaning of friends and their prayers and ministries don’t seem to apply. Messages that held spiritual value and significance to you, don’t seem to matter or apply now.
4. When you have sought God concerning the matter and it still grows worse. Thinking it was something you did that brought it on or must deal with in the spirit before it will end, you ask His forgiveness for every conceivable wrongdoing and sin, known, unknown, from your birth, even before you were born! By memory you’ve regurgitated every lie you’ve ever told, every comment ever made that offended, every cuss and every sneeze and repented endlessly and over again. Yet the situation continues to grows worse.
5. You begin to think or feel that nearly EVERYTHING you do, say or think is evil in His sight. You yourself perceive it all as evil. You become very cautious with your every move. Though error still slip in, you are very quick to repent of it, so it doesn’t get away unnoticed. It must be destroyed. No mercy. You feel the same of every good deed as you do of every sin, they are all the same, none is better than the other. All is unacceptable to Him who loves perfectly. Who you are, because of the sinful nature that you have no power to remove yourself, are also unacceptable. All except that perfect seed within you that is His Spirit. That alone makes you worthy, but you don’t see it, know it, feel it, hear it. It seems not to move or be alive.
Here your faith is tested as to whether you even believe He is there within. (This is a most difficult thing. You feel yourself utterly unloveable and unlovely, yet in the deepest crevasse of your inner most sanctum you sense a peace with it. Yet this does not yet register with your understanding. Your quandary is more in your mind, trying to make sense of all this. Trying to understand what it is you’ve done wrong. Only your spirit is perceiving it is loved in HIS Righteousness. It is the only thing to be loved in you.)
6. In desperation for the Lord, in prayer and seeking after Him, you become willing to abandon all you’ve understood before. (Religion can not live through this). What you had leaned on isn’t working anymore. Not here. This is too hard. This is too hopeless.
Eventually you think to ask that death would swallow you and be the answer to ending this anguish, yet you know somehow that it wouldn’t, it isn’t God’s will. You continue asking if you are deceived, asking for more Truth and Life, yet knowing this isn’t to be your request either somehow. So even that won’t suffice. Neither Life nor death holds solace. Only Christ will do. Yet Christ seems afar off, or to have forgotten you, forsaken you. You have nothing.
Your spirit is in a deep and dark place. It doesn’t even feel like you have a spirit anymore. You have nothing. Nothing in which to hope or lean on, look to or desire. This darkness closes in around you deeper and darker all the time. The loneliness that dwells in the deepest recesses seems the only thing you know.
It is here in this deep and very dark place, where even the darkness would seem to suffocate you, that something sustains you beyond your understanding. All you know is ‘you are’. You have no power or capacity to understand it, move it, show it, share it, take it or leave it. It is just there.
It is here that He is. He is stripping you of elements of the flesh nature that only He can perceive and understand at this stage. You must simply trust, even though it may not feel to you that it is Him at all. At some point though, He does let you know, or at least suspect, that it is Him. This is your way back out again. As you begin to know and trust it is Him, you give yourself up to Him as you are able. You die a day at a time. Here, you are a sacrifice and He the priest that has prepared you for this very sacrifice.
This is only a sample of possible indications of the actual dark night of the soul. There may be portions of our walk with God that have some of these conditions, but may not be an actual dark and Holy night. The soul will always suffer in its death. Ultimately it is all in His hands and whether you are brought low or lifted high, let Him have his way that He may complete a perfect work in you.
(**Please note: This is not like chronic or clinical depression. Though you may feel depressed because you are under your circumstances, and struggling to rise above them, this is not a chronic condition and does not usually manifest the same physical and even mental weaknesses that clinical depression does.)
My posts related to the Dark and Holy Night are;
6 Signs You Are in a Dark Night
