Life, at times, is like a cycle of night. As dusk wanes toward night, darkness’ veil thickens on the landscape. It is frightening, disparaging, and choking as the familiar venue surrounding you becomes merely a silhouette with shapeless specters of formerly familiar things. This phase mirrors that in life when things seem to slip slowly into madness. Not all slums in life come swiftly like a tornado, many slip in as painfully and quiet as the twilight. Slowly, but inevitably, all light fades away.

Then the night seems eternal.

A moonless night–thick–blanketed with miasmas of despair and dread, we all know the like. Things seem colder, further, more sinister as you struggle to remember where you just were, where you are, and how to get somewhere. Where? Anywhere, just away from the suffocating darkness.

Hour after hour–it gets darker as it goes. Everything waxes stranger, alien, and hostile. You struggle, you flounder around in the void, while people do what best they can to help you. And thank God for them. Embrace such people, for though they cannot dispel the night, they are candles. Candles flicker, candles fade, but they can provide enough light for long enough to avoid being swallowed by the tyranny of life’s midnight.

As you continue to wallow, at time’s almost helpless, in the abyss of life’s depravity, you reach the point where one of two things occurs: you are consumed or you wait. Both, by the way, require little to no option within your control. The terror of life’s circumstances, consequences, and just day-to-day will steal every shred of your sanity and will leave you a husk, or worse…or you can wait.

Why? Why on earth would you wait? How on earth could the circumstances and consequences and funk built up to this 4 am of life ever resolve to something acceptable? How do you…press on?

“The darkest hour always comes before the light”.

Night is cruel; it thickens, presses harder, grows more powerful as it gains momentum. Night is always the darkest right before the light. And then the dawn. The dawn pierces the night in a rescuing flood. The landscape begins to phase back into perception. The miasma of despondency is dissipated by the brilliant luster of hope.

But what brings the dawn? Life is set against us; it seeks to claim us all. This salvation that ushers in the dawn, then, cannot be found in this life itself. No solace can be found in something that originates from the domain that this darkness reigns from. I have found this solace. This beautiful dawn could only come from outside myself, outside my experience, outside this life. It came from Jesus, it comes from God, it comes from the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It is all I have to hold onto through the cycles of night that plague my life. It is all you can hold to when the cycles of night oscillate into your life. In the darkest hour remember, His dawn is coming, He rises without fail in the lives of His children.