Nowhere from his presence
He is in the dark too
In the dark night, the most painful thing is the sense that God is gone — that wherever he is, it is not here, not with us in the desolation. The psalmist, in a soaring meditation, answers this fear before we even raise it: Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
Notice the depths he names. Not only the heights of joy but the lowest pit, the darkest place a soul can sink — even there, you are there. There is no location, no mood, no spiritual condition outside the presence of God. The desolation that feels like his absence is, in fact, still full of him; we simply cannot feel it. His presence does not depend on our perception of it.
This is the difference between God's felt presence and his actual presence, and the dark night drives the lesson home. We may lose the feeling of God entirely, and conclude he has left — but feeling was never the measure of his nearness. He is as fully present in the dark, where we cannot sense him, as in the light, where we could. The darkness, the psalmist adds, is not dark to him. When God seems most absent, the truth is that you have simply lost the feeling of a presence that has not, for one moment, actually left.
“Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence?”
— David — Psalm 139:7 (WEB)
Trust God's actual presence over your felt sense of it — knowing there is nowhere, not even the dark pit, where he is not fully with you.
“In overflowing wrath I hid my face from you for a moment; but with everlasting lovingkindness will I have mercy on you, says the LORD your Redeemer.”
The mind treats its own sensations as instruments of truth, so when the feeling of God goes quiet it files the silence as fact and concludes he has gone. The interior work is to pry feeling and reality apart — to hold that there is nowhere we can flee from him and that the darkness is not dark to him — and to rest on a presence that perception cannot register but cannot revoke either.
This week, when God feels absent, preach the distinction to yourself: I have lost a feeling, not a presence. Deliberately affirm that he is fully with you in the dark, and act on his actual presence rather than your felt sense of his absence.
Here the flesh makes one fatal substitution: it reads the loss of a feeling as the loss of God himself, and offers the emptiness as proof of abandonment. But the darkness is not dark to him, and a soul that has learned to distrust its own gauge cannot be argued out of a presence simply because it has gone unfelt.
The sharpest pain of the dark night is the conviction that God is gone — that the desolation we feel is his actual absence. The psalmist dismantles this fear: there is nowhere we can go from God's presence, not the highest heaven nor the lowest pit. Even in the depths, even in the dark, you are there. The feeling of absence is not the fact of it.
This exposes the crucial distinction between God's felt presence and his real presence. We may lose the sensation of God entirely and rush to conclude he has abandoned us — but our feelings were never an accurate gauge of his nearness. He is as fully present in the unfelt dark as in the felt light. The hiding of his face, Isaiah says, is for a moment, but his steadfast love is everlasting. When God seems most absent, you have lost a feeling, not a presence; he has not, for one moment, actually left.
- Do I treat the felt absence of God as his real absence?
- Have my feelings become my gauge of God's nearness?
- Can I trust that he is fully present in the dark I cannot feel him in?
Lord, when I cannot feel you I conclude you are gone, mistaking a lost feeling for your real absence. But there is nowhere I can flee from your presence, and the darkness is not dark to you. Help me trust that you are fully here, even unfelt, and have never left. Amen.