Singing in the Dark

Seriously, if you haven’t heard of Nightbirde, you need to get your Google on right now and find her America’s Got Talent audition. It’s beautiful and inspiring. Her story is everywhere all of a sudden, and for good reason. I love her stage name; it came from a bird she heard singing in the dark outside her window, a bird that couldn’t see the sun yet but was singing anyway because it believed that the sun was coming. Lovely.

Before I saw the audition, I had already shared on Facebook a post I saw about her, an excerpt from a blog she wrote that was (as Roberta Flack puts it) singing my life with its words. She was talking about the horrible trials she had been going through and the struggles of her relationship with God through it all. And her words articulated some deep places in my heart. My trials weren’t as great as hers, but my night of the soul was very similar.

I am God’s downstairs neighbor, she wrote, banging on the ceiling with a broomstick . . . yes – yes, sister. So was I.

I have called [God] a cheat and a liar, and I meant it . . . Oh, yes. I was there, too. Battling my despair at his silence and my longing for his presence and my fury at his heartlessness.

I don’t often reflect on those dark places in which I’ve been, but Nightbirde sent me there again. And I cried again. Partly from reliving the ache and partly from appreciating the release I’ve now been given from it.

At some point when I was in the midst of all that agony, I happened to have occasion to read again the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. You know, the passage with the well-known shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” I think I’d always just kind of nodded at that and moved on. Jesus’ friend died. So, he cried. Okay.

But now I thought about that more. Why would he be crying about that? He already knew he was going to raise him again – he knew it days before he ever arrived at the tomb. He had no reason to be sad about a death he was just about to overturn. So, what exactly was he sad about? And this is one of those times when I felt like the Spirit spoke to me directly.

He wasn’t crying for Lazarus. He was crying for Mary and Martha.

For weeping Mary and Martha. “If you had been here,” they said, “he wouldn’t have died.” They felt devastated. Abandoned. Maybe even somewhat betrayed. He was hurting for their hurting. Even though he knew full well the joy that he was about to bring them, it broke his heart to see the pain they had to endure before they got there.

I saw him now. On my floor. When I was huddled in the corner of my closet sobbing, Jesus was sitting there beside me. And he was crying, too. Crying for me.

Referring to the parable of the weeds, Nightbirde writes, I believe that God can heal in one instant. I also believe that “no good thing does he withhold,” so there was something God was growing in the field that is me, and if God had pulled up all of this hardship too soon, it would have also pulled up all these miracles he did in my spirit.

I have believed this also for myself for quite a while – I think a small, shriveled part of me even believed it when I was huddled in the corner of my closet. But I strongly suspected I would go to my grave having to stand on that belief only in faith, with no direct evidence of the good that God was accomplishing through this ugliness.

I think I was wrong. I’m glad I’m wrong sometimes.