Courage in the Dark
Nadia Busekrus
Day 1 of 5: No Darkness
“God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.”
—1 John 1:5
Growing up, I believed that my faith gave me certainty. Raised Catholic, I was taught about a Tradition developed over millennia which had an answer and explanation for every hard question I ran into. Throughout high school and college, I wrestled with doubt at times but always found myself grounded in God’s love and my conviction that the faith I practiced was true.
I hung onto verses like 1 John 1:5, which seemed to promise me that with God, everything would be unquestionably, brilliantly, totally clear. I received prayers for wisdom, discernment, and freedom from confusion—and I mean I received them, claiming certainty and sure answers as something I could expect and depend on as a Christian.
Barbara Brown Taylor talks about something similar in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark—she calls it “full solar spirituality,” and it describes the way some of us think that walking in faith means we should be (capable of) staying in God’s light 100% of the time.
Throughout my childhood and all the way through college, my spirituality was usually “full solar.” But then I would read the Psalms—their stirring, raw language that often praised but sometimes softly cried and other times screamed out to God for guidance, for restoration, for peace. Most of my life I had been able to find peace, and I found that I could not relate easily to the words of the sad Psalms. The person writing them seemed to know darkness. I thought that the God I followed would never let me fully be surrounded by darkness like the Psalmists appeared to be. What I didn’t realize was that my perspective of God was about to become so much bigger.
Over the next four days, I will share how I learned to embrace darkness and find peace with uncertainty because God can be there, too.
Action Step: Are there any things you think you know for sure about God? To what extent is your faith grounded in the need to feel sure, to have answers, to be doing the right thing? There is no shame in this hunger for certainty. I have been there too. As you enter into the next several days of this devotional, I invite you to gently submerge yourself into questions and uncertainty. I invite you to consider a God who is darkness, as well as light.
Nadia Busekrus