Treasures Kept in the Dark

She arrived at punishment in about the eighteenth month, and she remembers the relief of it, which is the part that troubles her.

Because for a year and a half before that she had been asking why, and asking properly, and she had gone through everything. She had asked people. She had read. She had gone back over her own life looking for the thing, and had found ordinary things and dealt with them, and nothing had changed.

And what she could not tolerate was not the coldness. It was the absence of a reason for the coldness. A silence with no explanation in it felt like a room with no walls, and she is a woman who needs to know where she stands.

So she settled it. She decided it must be punishment, and she could not name what for, and that did not matter as much as you would think.

Because punishment has a shape. It has a cause and a duration and an end. It means somebody is still involved. It means she has not been forgotten but disciplined, and being disciplined is a relationship whereas being ignored is not.

She is forty-four. She has not told anybody, because said out loud it sounds like something a counselor would want to unpick, and she does not want it unpicked. It is holding the room up.

I am not going to explain your winter

Before I go near a verse, I want to say something plainly, because you will be waiting for it and I do not want you waiting through the whole article.

I am not going to tell you why this is happening.

I do not know. Nobody who has spoken to you about it knows either, including the ones who sounded certain, and a confident explanation of somebody else's dry season is a thing a person makes up in order to be helpful. I would rather leave you without a reason than hand you one I invented.

What I can do is take the false one away and put something true in its place, and the true thing is not an explanation. It is a location.

You are not owed an explanation that was never promised to you, and you have not been left in the dark by an oversight. Scripture is full of people God declined to explain Himself to and it never once treats that as neglect, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding a reason from you as a punishment.

What He says He does in the dark

And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.Isaiah 45:3

Read what that verse does and does not say, carefully, because it is easy to misuse and I do not want to misuse it on you.

It does not say the darkness was sent to teach you something. It does not assign a purpose to the dark, and it does not say the dark is good for you, and anybody who has quoted it at you that way was going further than the text goes.

What it says is that there are things God gives in dark places. That He is at work where nobody can see in, including where you are, and that the giving is not suspended for lack of light.

You are somewhere God has a documented practice of working, and He never once said He would explain it while it was happening. That is not me finding you a consolation prize; Isaiah 45:3 puts His giving inside dark and secret places, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it over a woman who settled for punishment eighteen months in.

What punishment was doing for you

Now let me be gentle about the verdict you chose, because you chose it under pressure and it was not stupidity.

You picked punishment because it kept Him in the room. That is what it was for. A God who is disciplining you is a God who is paying attention, and the alternative on offer, as you understood the options, was a God who had simply stopped noticing.

Given those two, you chose the one that kept the relationship, and I would rather you did that than the other thing.

But it is not true, and it is costing you. Because you have now spent two years relating to God as an authority who is displeased, and you cannot love somebody you are braced against, and you have been braced against Him since the eighteenth month.

You are not under discipline, and there is no charge and no sentence being served. The written word puts no condemnation on a person who is in Christ, and it does not add a clause about people who cannot feel anything, and the Holy Spirit is not the administrator of a punishment nobody can name.

And the option you thought you were choosing between is a false pair. The choice was never punished or forgotten. There is a third thing, and it is the thing Isaiah describes: present, working, giving, and not explaining.

You are held by a God who is doing something in the dark and has not offered to narrate it. Scripture puts His treasures in the secret places rather than in the well-lit ones, and the Holy Spirit has been at work in a season a woman has spent trying to get a reason out of it.