God’s apparent absence may be the beginning of experiencing God’s presence more deeply.

Heather, the successful pastor at Plum Ridge Church, had for a long time experienced an intimate relationship with God. But halfway through her sixth year at Plum Ridge, she was plunged into a cavernous dark night. All three signs of the dark night appeared: She could no longer pray in her usual ways, her spiritual life felt dry and empty, and she yearned for God’s love with all the depths of her being.

The dark night took Heather into a crisis of faith unlike anything she had known before. It felt like God had disappeared. While she wanted to believe that God was still working in her life and the lives of her congregants, she could not bring herself to believe it. When she stood behind the pulpit to preach, pray and lead worship, she felt like a robot, mouthing the words but having no more soul than an Intel processor running a giant but mostly empty hard drive, whirling without purpose.

From all that people in the congregation could tell, Heather was still the caring, effective and diligent pastor they had always known. Yet for Heather, church life was hollow. Why do we work so hard at trying to be the church? she wondered to herself. How worthwhile is all this frenetic activity—the committees, the potluck meals, the ceaseless stream of announcements, the fund-raising, the hospital visits, the endless cycles of Advent and Lent and all the other busyness of church life? Is this really what God wants us to be about?

In her personal life, Heather could no longer pray with conviction. Words, in fact, would not come at all. For years her favorite place to pray had been the garden in her back yard, where she could sit beside a fountain surrounded by native flowers, bushes and grasses. This garden, however, now felt like an empty desert. When she cracked open her Bible, she no longer found meaning in her favorite passages about creation, such as Psalms 65 and 104. In her dark night she turned instead to Job, finding peevish solace in his complaint about God’s absence (see Job 23:2-5, 8-9).

After several months, wordless frustration turned to fury at God for leaving her. One afternoon in the depth of anger she stood in her yard facing the mountains in the distance, and using the words of the psalmist, yelled at the top of her voice: “Rouse yourself. Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast [me] off forever. Why do you hide your face?” (Psalm 44:23-24).

Eventually the anger dissipated, and Heather settled into frigidity. The image that came to her was of being alone in the Antarctic, walking aimlessly in a blinding snowstorm, hearing nothing but howling wind, feeling nothing but bitter cold. Though she wanted God badly, God seemed to care nothing for her. “My God, my God,” she mourned, “why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22:1).

Heather’s dark night lasted 11 years. At various times her inner suffering was so intense that she almost left the Christian faith altogether. Had it not been for the sympathy and support of her husband, she might have done just that. But with great effort, she persisted.

Toward the end of the 11 years, Heather slowly realized that the dark night was spiritually cleansing her in a deep way. She saw that she had been obsessively attached to success, to her self-image as a competent person, to her unusual ability to develop caring relationships and to the honeymoon of her first six years at Plum Ridge. She realized that these attachments had become greedy gods that impoverished her ability to worship God alone.

Most of all, Heather perceived that her faith was being reassembled into something more radical. Gone was the old assumption that her emotional state accurately measured the presence or absence of God. She began to see that Christian discipleship sometimes means sheer, dogged perseverance through the intense suffering of emotional emptiness, intellectual obscurity and spiritual deprivation.

One day, near the end of her 11-year ordeal, Heather read Jesus’ parable of the pearl: “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:45-46).

These words suddenly gave her fresh insight, and she wrote in her journal: “This parable describes what’s happened to me over the last decade. I’m the merchant, except I didn’t choose to sell the pearls of my old faith so I could buy this ‘one pearl of great value.’ God made me sell those inferior pearls, and I kicked and screamed most of the time. I now see that the pearls I thought were so precious were in fact cheap costume jewelry: my hope for numerical and programmatic success, my reputation in the community, my emotional highs that once felt so ‘spiritual’ and my thin faith.

“Now I see that hidden in the soil of my life was a more beautiful pearl that came as a gift from God. I cannot put a price on its value because no money on earth could buy it. It came to me after intense suffering that I didn’t ask for and wouldn’t want to go through again. Yet now that God has given me such a luminous pearl, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. This pearl of faith glows with the light of Christ, impelling me to radical service—not for my glory but for the glory of Christ.”

The dark night and suffering: The suffering of the dark night can come to us through outward suffering such as debilitating illness, public humiliation, the death of a friend or other afflictions that life brings us. I am often asked whether God causes outward suffering such as hurricanes, cancer, war or traffic accidents. No, these happen because of how the natural world sometimes operates (hurricanes), because our bodies malfunction (cancer), because of human greed for power (war) or because of human error (traffic accidents). God remains with us through these events, offering us comfort and hope.

However, God may use these external sufferings as an opportunity to lead us inwardly into a dark night that purifies our faith—or God might not use them to initiate a dark night. Our outward suffering may lead to a dark night, or it may not. Not every form of suffering becomes a dark night, though every dark night includes some suffering.

The suffering of our dark night may be purely internal, as it was for Heather, who entered the night while being outwardly successful. In cases like hers, our suffering comes precisely because it seems that God no longer cares for us. We feel bereft of God’s love and find ourselves walking through the valley of dogged perseverance. In this situation, will we maintain our commitment to Christ when there are no rewards? Will we persist in the journey of faith when we see no light ahead? Stripped of the spiritual comforts and assurances that once sustained us, will we let pure faith carry us forward?

The gift of pure faith: Heather’s dark night was longer than most. After 11 years of sticking with a God whose presence she could not sense, she emerged from the valley of dogged perseverance, her fidelity to God strengthened. Early in the dark night she thought she had lost God, but later she discovered what she really lost were her false illusions about God. She discovered that God guides us through suffering to the pearl of inestimable worth.

This pearl is pure faith. Through the suffering of the dark night, we come to a place of sheer faith, stripped to its bare knuckles. God becomes paramount because everything else is taken away from us: our false self-image, our vaporous dreams, our petty preoccupations. We learn that even if God seems to forsake us (which God never does), we have no one else to turn to except God. God becomes our all.

As we emerge from the dark night we discover that we can now trust in God despite all evidence to the contrary. Our new trust is not so much a trust in God’s promises but a trust in God as a person. With this trust woven into the fiber of our being, we no longer need to understand everything about Christian faith. We can handle mystery, spiritual paradox and further trials without them shaking our trust in the fidelity of God.

What Tim saw: The dark night transforms our faith in ways that others may notice. Tim, Heather’s husband, noticed three new things about her after those 11 years. First, he realized that she had more capacity to wait peacefully with other people who were suffering. Second, he noticed in her an overriding desire to do the right thing, regardless of how it might affect her reputation. And third, he detected in her the flowering of a qualitatively new relationship with God. When Tim shared this last observation with her, Heather replied, “Yes, I would say that because of the dark night, God has now become my friend.”