His anger is but for a moment, and His favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalm 30:5

At the age of 37 I entered a three-year “dark night of the soul” called mid-life crisis.  No, I didn’t buy a red sports car, abandon my family, and become a beach bum.  Mostly I cried a lot.  Sometimes at night I would go outside, look up at the stars, and ask, “God, where are you?” and weep again because the heavens were brass.  One day I fell crying into my wife’s lap—telling her that I needed God to step out of heaven and tell me that everything will be all right.  Her answer was Spirit-inspired: “God is not going to step out of heaven and tell you that, but I’m here and I’m telling you that everything is going to be all right!”  Marge and my friends became the voice and heart of Jesus during that bleak time.  They took my hand and carried the Light for me throughout the night until morning came again. 

Among the many lessons I learned at that time is when your soul is in anguish, the wonder of creation loses it’s capacity to create joy.  I even wrote a psalm about it—my mid-life crisis psalm. I’d like to repeat it here, but I’ve misplaced it.  The sum of it, though, is that I bewailed the loss of joy in my vocation as a Christian school administrator, in my wife and children, and in the natural world.  Living in Northern California at the time, I had access to some of the world’s most amazing natural wonders: Big Sur, the redwood forest, the Sierra Nevada, Point Reyes, and typically awe-inspiring Yosemite.  Yet they became incapable of giving me joy.  I was heartsick and only God could heal me—which He eventually did.  And I learned the lesson that C. S. Lewis taught in Screwtape Letters:

Sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from [the believer’s] conscious experience, all. . . supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. [Chapter 8]

The creation by itself never satisfies the soul—a fact learned when one is heartsick.  It’s the existence, love, and care of our Creator/Savior and His people that makes joy in anything possible.  If the soul of someone in your sphere of influence is struggling in the night, stay with them and carry the Light; and keep reminding them that joy—and growth—will come again with the morning.

[Yosemite photos Uploaded on November 17, 2009 by ohad*]
[Candle image: www.massbible.org/blog/labels/light.html]