Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

I hope you’ve been enjoying this summer in the Psalms as much as I have. Over the next two Sundays I get the privilege (and I really do mean that!) of leading us into the black hole of the Psalter, Psalms 88 and 89. 

Psalm 88 plunges us into one of the darkest chapters of Scripture, a lament without resolutions that ends in abandonment, isolation, and darkness. British preacher Charles Spurgeon said about it, “If ever there was a song of sorrow and a Psalm of sadness, this is one.” Or, if you prefer a dated Simon & Garfunkel reference, “Hello darkness, my old friend.” This Sunday we’ll seek to answer the question: how do we keep coming to God in prayer when we’re experiencing this dark night of the soul? You’ll have to wait until then for that.

For now, I wanted to share a few broader thoughts to help us prepare. First, this experience of the dark night of the soul, when a Christian who has known the love and presence of God suddenly experiences his poignant and painful absence, is actually quite common. If you are in a season where God seems distant, you’re not alone and it doesn’t mean your faith isn’t real.

Second, along those same lines, how incredible is it that Psalms like these are part of God’s Word? God wants us to pray them and to sing them back to him! One woman at church who has known intense grieving said this recently and it has stuck with me: “These are the Psalms that have sustained me when I’m at my worst, not the happy ones… Our act of worship is to bring what we have to God; if we have anger, we bring anger. If we have grief, we bring grief, because that’s what we have to offer… If I could only bring God my happy praise, then I probably wouldn’t come to him at all.”

Psalms like these are indeed a gift to God’s people. They remind me of a video clip I go back to about once a year. In it Kevin Twit, who is an RUF campus minister at Belmont and helped start the Indelible Grace hymn movement, recalls a time when he was part of a worship songwriting panel in Nashville. They were asked what criteria makes for a good song to be recorded or sung in worship. After others mentioned things like singability, poetry, and catchiness, Kevin Twit said, “I want songs that are going to prepare my students for their encounter with death.” The entire 18-minute clip is well worth your time (and if you do, you can listen to the songs he mentions here and here), but this line alone has stuck with me for years. The songs we sing together as God’s people are a huge part of what equip and sustain us for every season of life, even (especially) the dark night of the soul.