A Ramble About Training Wheels

What is the darkness that God allows us to face? It is a part of our maturation process as His children, and it is as necessary as it is disorienting and disconcerting. The darkness feels like absence and abandonment. Like we have lost all sense of His presence that we have come to know and have gotten used to. But what is it?

The darkness is absence. It is not His absence, but it is the absence of everything which we have come to associate with Him. The hundred and one little ways which He chose, in the beginning, to communicate with us and commune with us through our senses. We are used to using our senses to gather information about the world around us, this is how we operate in the physical world. God knows this and He gets our attention in the way we will most understand, in the "language" we most understand. He communicates with us, and He shows us something of Himself through information passed to us through our senses and thoughts.

But then, somewhere along the way it all begins to vanish. Sometimes it's very abrupt, sometimes it fades slowly depending on the person. But eventually, it ceases. And we are left without our "training wheels" so to speak. God may use a song on the radio at first to get your attention. But the song is a tool. It is not God Himself. He may use a billboard, a book, a T.V. show, or a favorite scripture. But while these might be His tools and hold special meaning for us. He is not any one of those things.

His objective for our lives is that we would know Him, as He is. And He is completely other than the created world around us. When we look to know Him with our five senses we find a void. A big gaping void that makes no sense. We find a darkness instead of a lit object. We find an absence of anything tangible that we can relate to as we normally would anything else. This is Him as He is, and not as we have perceived Him to be. Not the image that we have constructed about Him, but the Reality which is so totally other than our senses cannot cope or hope to describe Him to us.

This is why this darkness is so important, and yet so disturbing. This is why it is so important to understand what is going on, and that it is not His absence, rather the absence of every "object" we had associated with Him. This is the meaning of the second command in the Ten Commandments,

“You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me, and showing loving kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." (Exodus 20:4-6, WEB)

It is easy to get comfortable with God coming down to our level and talking to us in a way we understand with our flesh, but this isn't where God wants us to stay. His goal is to bring us closer to Himself and union with Himself. His goal is for us to move past our physical senses until we trust Him regardless of what those senses are telling us.

It makes it harder when the enemy attacks us when we begin to experience the darkness. They know it's when we're disoriented and frightened that we're at our weakest. This is when it is most opportune for them to try and get your attention the way He was doing and get you to do "something", anything except for be still and direct your love and trust into the void. And they hammer and hammer at you.

Sometimes God pulls you back from it. He gives you a break so you can get your bearings again. But He doesn't intend for you to stay there. It's only a breather. In order for you to make the kind of progress He intends, He must put you back into it, and you must understand that it's the norm. It's the next level of the process of becoming one with Him. He knows how much you can take and how much you can't. He's not going to move you any faster than you're ready for, or any slower.

When we first learn to ride a bike, we use training wheels. This makes us feel secure enough to keep practicing. But eventually, a good parent knows that it's time to take them off, or else we won't ever really know how to ride a bike the way it was meant to be ridden. We'll be confined to the street around our house and sorely limited in our mobility.

The training wheels eventually have to come off. We'll wobble and fall and skin our knees a few times, but if we get back on the bike and keep practicing we'll eventually get it. God knows this, which is why He keeps throwing us back into it even when we don't want to go.

God is always where you are. You cannot run from Him because all creation depends on Him for it's existence, including you. He loves you more deeply than you can possibly fathom. What seems like His absence is anything but. It's Him pulling the training wheels off and teaching you to do this for real.