The Choice to Love Amidst Darkness

I received some great advice from a reader on Friday last week and I asked his permission to write an article about it.

When we find ourselves on the brink of a type of darkness, prayer is an effort, the joy seems to be sucked out of the spiritual life and our vocation, we tend to do something that causes us to get worse: think about ourselves. We dwell on ourselves and on the problem at hand and consistently berate ourselves about not getting out of the funk.

Why can't I flip the switch to be instantly joyful?

Why can't I change things so that I am able to make things better right now?

Why can't I have joy in prayer right now?

Why doesn't God allow me to experience the high that I experienced on that retreat or at that conference?

Why is the vocation that I seemed to be so passionate about at the beginning fallen into a kind of emotional lull?

All of these questions focus on the problem and don't seem to realize that the problem is outside of ourselves. It is as if we are lost (I do this all the time) and we simply keep driving, hoping to see something familiar that will tell us where to go.

Just stop the car.

Get out. Ask for directions. Better yet, talk to someone. Do something for someone else.

Many times the trick to getting out of the darkness, out of the funk, out of the blues is to give yourself to someone else in sacrifice. While there is no real "foolproof" way to cure falling into darkness, it's not a magical formula, there are some things that we can do to take the focus off of ourselves which many times is the real problem.

1. Do something for someone. Do a good deed for free for someone else. Volunteer your time at a soup kitchen, make a special dinner for the family, go out of your way to do something for someone that they wouldn't expect.
2. Go through the prayer list. Your prayers may be more focused on yourself than they should be. Go through the list of people that you have promised to pray for and pray for them. If you don't have a list, make one.
3. Write a letter. Write to someone close to you about what is going on. When I wrote about what was going on in my own prayer life, the response I got that there were people praying for me and that there were others who were going through the same thing was very encouraging.
4. Admit you don't have all the answers. If you are in ministry there are probably a lot of people who are looking to you for the answers. Give yourself a break and ease the pressure by finally admitting that there are many parts to the Body of Christ and you are only one of them.
5. Make the choice to love and to pray. There is a distinct difference between the saints and the sinners. When the saints sinned, they saw that as an opportunity to get up again and allow the grace of God to work through them. This is humiliating because we admit that we are wrong.

What are some of the techniques that you have used to get through spiritual darkness? Again, this is not a clear way to get out of spiritual darkness, but it helps to focus elsewhere. Sometimes we can get blinded to the root of the problem when we get distracted by the little things and allow them to get us down.

Keep in mind that to desire sainthood is a choice.

A choice to love.