Waiting in the Dark

I started college when I was 22 years old. I had already been out in the world for a few years at that time. I had bills and expenses, and was starting to accrue debt. I moved into the dorm and went to school full time, but I didn’t have the luxury of not having to work also. I got a work study job that paid for my room and board. But I also had to do quite a bit of other work on the side, and one of the jobs that I had was working as a nanny.

I primarily worked for three different families over that three and a half years. All of them pretty well off financially. One of the families that I worked for had the hugest house I had ever seen. Not only was it enormous enough to get lost in, but it was also set on large, gated property, covered with woods. This was in the days before I carried a cell phone, and so on the nights that I was out there alone with the children, it felt a little isolated. On a normal night, that wasn’t a problem, but more than once, I was out there during a storm, and though I normally love storms, in that setting, it pretty much freaked me out.

One particular Saturday night, after I had put the kids to bed, I heard a storm rolling in. I went down into the den and turned on all of the lights, turned on the television, and was talking to a friend on the cordless house phone when there was a startling flash of light, a deafening crash of thunder, and then suddenly, I was plunged into the utter darkness and silence of a power outage.

I jumped about ten feet. And for about thirty seconds, I thought I’d gone into heart failure.

It’s a scary experience when your world stops. When everything goes dark and silent, and you feel more isolated than you’ve ever felt in your life.

When I was 22, I broke off my engagement and ended the relationship that I had spent the previous three years on. Overnight, I went from having my future planned and seemingly secure to not knowing what my purpose in life was or where I was going to go. As often happens when break-ups happen, I lost many of my friends because they didn’t know how to be friends with me now that I wasn’t connected to my fiancé any longer. They took sides, and I lost. I was facing what felt like an empty future, and I was facing it alone.

In this week’s chapter of Andy Stanley’s “The Grace of God,” Andy talks about a time where God seemed to go silent. The only thing I’ve learned in thirty-five and a half years about God going silent is that when I can’t hear Him talking, it just means that either I’m not listening or I’m not ready to hear what He has to say. But I love that Stanley highlights that during that time of seeming silence, God wasn’t still – He was quietly bringing about the things He had promised.

Sometimes, you have to wait a while in the dark and quiet before the lights come back on. When God turns the lights back on, His promises are fulfilled. That gives me the hope I need to live through the storm and the blackout that follows.

This post is part of a weekly discussion on Andy Stanley’s book, “The Grace of God.” You don’t have to read the book to chat with us. But if you did write a response to this chapter, please run by my co-facilitator Jason Stasyszen’s place to link up at the widget. And I’ll see you back here next week!