When Darkness Comes Back

There are days that do not arrive gently.

They do not come dressed in golden light or quiet promise. They come fast. Hard. With the ring of a phone, the rush of feet, the sudden turn from ordinary life into something you never wanted to live through again. They come with hospital walls and waiting rooms and words you never wanted attached to someone you love.

And when it happens again...when it is not the first time, when memory itself becomes part of the pain...there is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles in, hard and fast.

It's not just fear.
It is something deeper and lonelier than sorrow.

It is the bone-deep weariness of thinking, haven’t we already done this?
Haven’t we already survived this once?
Haven’t we paid enough by now?

Sometimes, God doesn't give us the easy answer for those questions.

Sometimes, He asks you to simply abide. To wait. To be still, even when life has returned to that hard place of doubt and fear.

This past week brought another one of those hard returns to the old questions asked, and a new call to trust and abide.

My oldest son was hospitalized after two serious grand mal seizures. Eighteen months ago, a similar crisis nearly took his life. There was ICU time then, with long hours suspended between hope and dread. It was the kind of helplessness a mother does not easily forget, no matter how much time passes.

We thought—maybe because we needed to think it—that it would not happen again.

But then it did.

And yet...he is home now. And I am grateful for that in a way I do not even know how to put into words. Unfortunately, home does not always mean okay. Home does not erase the new  diagnosis. It does not erase this place of uncertainty, or the fear, or the hard road stretching out in front of all of us. Some storms pass through...but others change the sky.

And still, morning comes, and it with it hope.

I do not say that lightly. I do not mean it in the polished way people sometimes speak of hope, as if hope were something pretty you set on a shelf. Hope is not decorative. Not here. Not in a life where hard things keep coming back around. Not when your heart has already learned too many ways it can break.

Sometimes hope is not a feeling at all. Sometimes it is something you pick up and carry because the alternative is to let the darkness carry you...and that is not the way of FAITH.

Sometimes faith is a choice made with shaking hands.

Sometimes it is an act as small as making coffee and standing at the window and whispering, Lord, help me stay in the light.

I have lived through enough near-tragic moments to know that darkness is real. I am not interested in pretending otherwise. Some seasons are relentless. Some years seem to come at you in waves, one thing after another, barely giving you room to breathe before the next breaker washes over you. And if you are not careful, those dark places start to feel like the truest thing.

But they are not the truest thing.

They are real.
They are painful.
But they are not sovereign.

I have learned that I cannot live in those dark interior places for long and remain myself. I cannot build a life there, in the darkness of doubt and fear. I cannot surrender my mind to despair and call it wisdom. I need light. I need dawn. I need mercy. I need the quiet insistence that God is still here, still good, still holding what I cannot hold together on my own.

So I keep reaching for light.

Not because life has been easy.
Not because everything has turned out fine.
Not because I am untouched by fear.

I reach for light because I need it in order to stay whole.

There is a kind of radical optimism that probably looks foolish from the outside. It is not denial. It is not naïveté. It is not the refusal to see what is hard. It is the refusal to let what is hard be the only thing that speaks.

It says: Yes, this is terrible. Yes, this hurts. Yes, I am tired...oh, so very tired. But no, I will not hand myself over to hopelessness.

That kind of optimism is not shallow. It is survival.

It is how some of us keep standing when the news keeps breaking our hearts.

It is how we keep making coffee in the morning, even when our hands still feel unsteady from the day before.

It is how we answer emails, fold laundry, return texts, show up for work, whisper prayers we barely have the energy to form, and keep loving the people in front of us while part of our soul is still sitting in a hospital room.

It is how we keep from disappearing into the hard things.

And maybe that is one of the quiet mercies of ordinary life.

A hot cup of coffee.
A slant of morning light through the window.
A familiar, comfy chair.
A prayer I mean...and also struggle through...because I am so tired.
A table that still waits for me.
And a glorious sunrise that asks nothing except that I lift my eyes and notice it.

These things do not erase suffering. They do not fix what is broken. But they remind me that beauty has not abandoned me. That goodness has not vanished. That grace still comes close, even here.

And that matters more than people think.

In hard seasons, we need tangible reminders that not everything is chaos. Not everything is loss. Not everything is slipping through our fingers. Some things remain. Warmth. Breath. Prayer. Presence. Love. The mercy of one more morning.

This is not a triumphant story. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.

This is just the testimony of someone who has learned that when life goes dark, you turn toward the light anyway.

You do it in faith.
You do it in trust.
You do it because your sanity depends on it.
You do it because despair is a cruel place to live.
You do it because mercy still meets us there—quietly, sometimes barely perceptible, but it is real.

And so here I am.

Still standing.
Still trusting.
Still believing that dawn means something.
Still convinced that light is worth reaching for.
Still pouring coffee and asking God for enough grace for this day, and then the next, and then the next.

Maybe that is what courage looks like.

Not certainty.
Not ease.
Just the quiet decision to keep going.

To keep the lamp lit.
To keep watch for morning.
To believe that mercy will come, even here.