Today I awoke out of a serial-killer-based nightmare, and I was afraid.
It used to be a common experience, this fear. Throughout my childhood, my sleep was infested with nightmares whose grip on me lingered even after the sun started shining through the window. As I got older, my childish fear of the dark and its monsters evolved, not into rational confidence, but into a fear much deeper than simple residue from an unpleasant dream. Inexplicably, the nightmares became tied to my relationship with God.
I have been a Christian since the age of six, when I recognized my sinful nature and asked Jesus to save me. The day I was baptized as a proclamation of my faith marks the beginning of the most significant joy I have ever had in life. And I never doubted, not once, that Jesus loved me and that I believed in Him.
Somehow, though, sometime during high school, in moments of fear I began to doubt my salvation. I began to question the existence of God. Once this started it became ever harder to ignore, until these thoughts plagued me nearly every night. I would wake, exhausted, from one nightmare, and plunge straight into another in which my faith was weak and I was too difficult, too doubtful, and too wrapped up in sin for God to want to save me. In the shadows of my room I could see nothing but emptiness, hear nothing but lies.
Alone in the silence one night, I spoke things into the darkness. Lies I never wanted to believe, but couldn’t shake.
Jesus is tired of forgiving you. He’s decided to leave you behind where you belong.
You are kidding yourself. There is no God.
There is no God.
I didn’t believe them, and yet I had formed these words with my own mouth. As I did so, I felt something vanish from within me. The resolve I once had, as a child declaring my love for my Savior, turned to a cold dread that seeped into my chest.
I experienced a void in which there was no light, no love, no hope. And in this moment I realized what it truly meant to be separated from God.
In the moments before Jesus’ death, God turned His face from His son, unable to look upon the sins that Jesus, though innocent, bore on the cross.
Jesus, never before torn from the loving gaze of his Father, having lived in perfect unity with God since the beginning of time, must have felt that loss so much more immensely than we can ever imagine. He cried out to God in anguish, “Father, why have you forsaken me?”
He was alone, like all sinners are alone before they know God. Like I was in my doubt, questioning the truth I had accepted so long ago.
How could I have fallen so far, that I would allow these things a foothold in my spirit? I had let the fear that surrounded me take hold of my heart, and had turned my own words against myself.
If there truly was no God, walking away from him in that moment would have been easy, not wrenching. Passing from faith to doubt would have had no effect on the core of my being. But it did. I felt restless, desperate to prove my doubt wrong–and this desperation, ironically, gave me the determination to seek God’s truth, and my faith, with consuming passion.
Though for a time I felt I’d lost something precious, in processing this over the next year, I came to understand more fully than ever before what Christ went through as he took his final breath on the cross. And I was more convinced, though my faith had been shaken, that I had been shown the depth of God’s love, and the fullness of His glorious light, in contrast to the emptiness I had felt in the darkness that night. Experiencing the absence of God convicted me of His existence, the same way a frigid winter day makes us more aware of our need for warmth.
The sun, though it sinks below the horizon, never actually ceases to shine–and God, in His infinite faithfulness, never truly left my side. As Jesus was restored from the depths of despair to life, and given his place at God’s right hand, so I was restored to faith by the One who rescues me.
