Day 148: Job 22, 23 and 24

If only I knew where to find him (Job 23:3).

St. John of the Cross, a 16^th century Spanish mystic, wrote The Dark Night of the Soul to describe the painful and lonely journey of an individual seeking spiritual maturity. John wrote his treatise while imprisoned by his own monastic brothers for his attempts to reform the order. It symbolizes a spiritual crisis in which God seems far off and unreachable.

Watchman Nee, the Chinese church planter who died in 1972 after twenty years in prison, wrote about the brokenness of the outer man in The Release of the Spirit. He talked about how God uses struggles and hardships in our lives to break the shell (the personality or the soul) that binds the inner man (the spirit). Nee and John could have been reading each other’s emails.

We talk about times when God seems to be hiding and our prayers bounce off the ceiling, times we cry out to God but get no answer. That’s what Job was experiencing. He was seeking, but God was nowhere to be found.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest (Psalm 22:1,2).

It seems that Christ also experienced the dark night of the soul.

TODAY’S MEDITATION

Have your cries to God for mercy ever been answered only with silence? Reflect on what that was like and on what you learned.