Enter the Dark
The following essay is the second reflection for our April focus on the spiritual practice of Prayer. Read more here about our exploration of the spiritual disciplines in 2025 through creative and reflective writing.
An excerpt from What We Find in the Dark, Loss, Hope, and God’s Presence in Grie (NavPress, 2025)
My best friend, my ride-or-die of over twenty-five years, is dying of breast cancer. My faith tells me that God could stop it. But God is not stopping it. And since I do not have the power to stop it myself, there is an actual physical ache in my chest. I feel like I’m molting, melting, like my intestines and tendons and soul are spilling out of me. I regularly place my hand on my heart and whisper, “You are safe. You are contained. You are not splattering everywhere.”
God also seems distant from me in this season. I don’t know what God is doing. Why are God’s presence and power sometimes so evident, so palpable that even the most committed doubter couldn’t deny his miracle-making, yet other times so abstruse, so not there? I’ll never understand. Theologians say that if I did understand, it wouldn’t be God I understood. God, in being God, is mysterious, inexplicable, beyond containing with our notions. There’s no explaining incomprehensibility, I guess.
So I am meeting with a new spiritual director, Ben, and I’m trying to find my bearings in all this uncertainty, in what is starting to feel like spiritual upheaval, spiritual unravel.
In one of our first sessions together, Ben guides me through an imaginative spiritual practice he calls “Jesus on the Bridge.” I feel dubious as I watch him walk across his office to a CD player (of all things), press an open button (of all things), and put in a CD (of all things). I move rapidly from dubious to cynical when nature sounds begin to play a bit too enthusiastically over the weary speaker system. I privately ask God to remove my cynicism. I want to enter this experience with an open heart.
I close my eyes, adjust myself on Ben’s couch, and place my two feet firmly on the carpet beneath me. I square my shoulders, put my hand over my heart, pull in a deep breath, and exhale my skepticism in order to be here now. Gratefully, this time I find the birdsong peaceful. The crunch of gravel relaxing. The sound of a rushing river centering. Soon, I am able to be present in this moment. But then Ben invites me to “sit with Jesus on a bridge over a river” in my imagination, and I startle, almost freezing at the invitation.
I don’t know if you’ve walked through a spiritual exercise like this before, something intended to ignite your spiritual imagination. These practices can be transformational. The Spirit of God tends to show up with so much love in moments like these. But with my anticipatory grief over losing Jenn, and what feels like spiritual darkness crowding around me, this kind of ask is excruciating. Lately, I struggle anytime I am asked to “picture” Jesus. Other spiritual mentors have prompted me to imagine myself sitting on Jesus’ lap or leaning against his frame in a field of wildflowers. I have friends who love imagining that they are sitting on a park bench with Jesus. I just can’t do it. It’s weird. It makes me cringe. There’s some block there, some sort of wall that keeps me from whatever spiritual illumination is supposed to happen.
So today, when Ben asks me to picture Jesus on the bridge just sitting with me, having fun with me, and making me feel loved, I get frustrated. This won’t work. I want to grind out. Instead, I fight back tears. I am bone-weary from asking God to show up, to hear me, to do something.
This searing feeling of loss, this wondering where God is, and this exhaustion from begging him to show up time and time again with what feels like no response, has a name—the dark night of the soul.
I am worn out from willing myself to “be with Jesus on the bridge.” I don’t know if Ben notices my anxiety or if this is part of the spiritual exercise’s purpose. But he asks me, as I sit on this imaginary bridge, to “stand up and walk to a beach” in my imagination.
“Ask God to meet you there,” he adds.
The music soundtrack shifts now. I stretch my legs and shift my body, trying to be present again. Soon, I’m in an ocean scene by night. I hear the tide’s inhale and exhale, a crackling bonfire. I am suddenly there, walking along the sandy shore.
And that is when a lion appears at my side.
This lion is alert, a protector. But also somehow warm and inviting, with big golden paws, a wild, tangled mane, and a coat so warm and smooth, I can almost feel it.
The lion’s pace is slow, and I sense it telling me to go as slow as I need to. I will keep pace with you. This beast is not scary; it’s just sort of around. There. Here. Now. Weaving in and out of my path on the sand as the stars shimmer above us—always keeping watch, keeping time, keeping steady with me on the beach. Sometimes, its large paws playfully pat at the ocean tide. Sometimes, the lion plods deliberately behind me. All the while, I sense that patient, unbothered steadiness: I can go as slow as you need me to.
I understand this is counterintuitive even as I experience it—after all, we should move at God’s pace, not the other way around, right? Isn’t that what faithful Christians do? And yet somehow, I know this is simultaneously true: If God is willing to go as slow as we need to through the thick fog of night, that means we do not have to rush to solve it or emerge from it or even “win” it.
God is never in a hurry as we are hurried because hurry is the opposite of love. Though I am in a rush to decipher the dark night’s mysteries, though I am desperate to time jump to ten years from now when this year is a distant memory, and I’ve made sense of it and learned the lessons from it—
God is neither rushed nor delayed.
The dark night is slow work.
Ben interrupts my meandering thoughts. “Aubrey, if there is anything you want to say to God while you are on the beach, feel free to voice that aloud or say it silently in your mind.”
I choose the silent route. Okay, Lion, I think to myself, or maybe I think these things toward God, hurl them near God, bleed them out in the direction of God. If you are keeping pace with me, I have some . . . thoughts.
If you are keeping pace with me, if you are truly here, then why does it feel like you’re abandoning me in my darkest hour—right when I have needed your comfort and your peace the most? I am so angry at you. Am I repellant? Have I disappointed you? Have I done something wrong? Are you punishing me for something? Or am I delusional, and this is simply how it feels when life gets hard? And how long will this distance, this silence, last? Are you even listening to me? This is too much, God. I am exhausted.
I pause my diatribe briefly to gather my thoughts and then press on. My faith feels so frail, so small. Can this minuscular belief be enough for you? Because it doesn’t feel enough for me.
This spiritual practice may invite me to use my holy imagination, but we are never asked to playact with God. Faith never requires pretending. So I roll my ankles, stretch my neck, and pause before naming, before admitting, the last of my questions.
Is your arm so short that you cannot stop cancer?
Are you weak?
Are you even able?
Are my prayers just an afterthought to you? A joke?
Because I have been asking you to heal Jenn and I have been asking you to show up with me, and your silence is callous.
I feel electric as I finally let my raw, red, enflamed laments unfurl. These are the real ones, the questions I am afraid of, the ones that have been thrumming within me for some time now, beating against the edges of my bones, hammering under the pores of my skin. Today, they have become a lit fuse racing toward me, ready to explode. My lament is a bid, a fight for my relationship with God. And I need him to answer, or I might not survive the dark night.
Still, with what little mustard seed I can muster, wrung out after this audacious questioning, I risk one more plea:
God, please. Please. Please. Please come be with me again. Please be who you say you are. Please keep loving me. Please don’t leave me alone in this.
In your own dark night, you probably have some unspoken questions, the subterranean ones. You are not alone in that. It’s not faithless to ask your cavernous questions. It’s a bold act of worship because lament requires intimacy. If you’ve got some spitfire for Jesus, I say, set the night ablaze.
That’s what lament is after all – it’s the impolite, impudent prayers of the beloved, heard, held, and welcomed by God.
Aubrey is the author of five books, including her bestselling kid's book: Big Feelings Days, and her latest What We Find in the Dark: Loss, Hope, and God's Presence in Grief. She co-planted and co-leads Renewal Church in the Chicagoland area, and hosts the What We Find in the Dark Podcast. You can connect with her on Substack and on Instagram @aubsamp.
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Oh I love this excerpt so much. What a comfort it must be to others who will read and find themselves in their own version of Aubrey’s story.
Thank you for your honesty in sharing this. I needed this reminder as I walk through a difficult season in my life. Sadly, most Christians I have encountered don’t know what to do with the raw emotions of a dark night. Consequently, that adds to the sense of isolation and being alone with the grief. Thank God for His promises to never leave us alone…