“This is never going to end, is it?” In bottled-up tears I accepted the defeat at the very end of myself after four years of resisting. I had truly given everything I had in me.
So 2024 is the year everything changed.
At the end of 2022, in the spiral to the rock bottom in all of my physical, emotional and spiritual health, I came across Father Ronald Rolheiser’s writings (thanks to John Mark Comer) on the dark night of the soul:
“But dark nights of the soul strike where you least expect, where you’re vulnerable and don’t know it. She had anticipated all the things that might shake her foundations, except the one that actually did … A dark night of the soul is a crisis that shakes our deepest conviction about how God, faith, the world, and our own personalities work. But, by doing this, these dark nights also shake us in our complacency, expose our illusions and false romanticism, show us where we most need God, and invite us to a deeper level of maturity.” (October 5, 2003)
The thing about the dark night of the soul that we don’t like to talk about is this: It is a deep refining, purging of deep-rooted idols — that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
That the only, only way through to the other side is to accept the utter defeat of the self.
To be deeply soul-awakened will radically change everything; to not yield to a way of living like this world is home. Paul says we are to pass through, this is wilderness.
2019 To 2023: A deep Spring cleaning
It felt like a blindside, as it wasn’t like something had in itself happened. It is like asking someone who may have everything going for them in life but found out they have cancer or any incurable disease, ‘What happened?’ Nothing… happened. I was defeated. I was on the verge of death in the dark night. Then I was rescued and saved in a loving act of His mercy.
My physical health was not in an incurable state and I had a successful surgery in February 2023. But emotionally and spiritually, I learned in the dark night that as a society, we settle for a lot of unhealthy patterns and ways of life or relationships. That the bar (for love, life and leadership) is set so low by our humanness and fear of failure.
By July 2023, my emotional and spiritual health crash ended, and He took over completely.
I had to so violently fail to get to the pride of wanting a victorious Gospel without the deep defeat. Because if you were to ask a historian, they will tell you that Jesus was defeated. It is only our faith – real faith – that would tell us otherwise. Father Ronald Rolheiser writes,
“In that darkness, when we have nothing left … we can no longer manipulate our experience of God, fudge it, project ourselves into it, or use it to rationalize divine permission for our own actions. Real faith begins at the exact point where our atheistic critics think it ends, in darkness and emptiness, in religious impotence, in our powerlessness to influence how God flows into us.” (November 16, 2016)
It is tempting to resist feeling powerless or simply redefine power by the world.
We may be far too learned about the Sunday victory than to sit in the Friday suffering and the Saturday ambiguity for all our life on earth until, Sunday comes again.
Victory is of course an easier sell in the evangelical church culture I was a part of, where in busy defeating of ‘the other’ critics distracted the defeating of the far more dangerous ‘self’.
In some ways, I believe many of us started out in well-intentioned ways of ‘proving’ God so badly to an unbelieving world that mocks our faith. To show a ‘victorious life with God’ is ever so desirable and ended up playing to the rhythm of the world only to be defeated by it.
Like Peter’s denial of Jesus, we are not wired to accept defeat — that life on earth is not the victory of our callous hearts so desire. The modern church may also have romanticized the idea of “surrender” that doesn’t paint the full picture of what it truly is: It’d shake you up so violently and leave you disoriented about everything you had known.
A girlfriend gave me the best response to my defeat and the new journey I would be led to embark in 2024, “you are giving up to give it to God to deal with the battle you can’t win”.
2024: Coming through to the other side
Like Peter, my initial instinct was denial of defeat until I had to deeply grieve my denial. If 2023 was rebirth, 2024 was repair; rebuilding on secure love attachment to God like Peter.
In a world where loud is louder, the path of public humiliation in defeat is to be shun but the humiliation I still deeply feel is worth the deep place of a fulfillment I find myself in.
2024 started in embracing the humiliation of the defeat and to walk towards it trusting in the refiner’s fire. It was just unthinkable. By June 2024, I began experiencing the profound breakthrough of what Father Ronald Rolheiser wrote of the dark night as an impasse:
“We let our disillusion, broken symbols, and failed meanings become the space wherein God can reset our faith, feelings, imagination, and intellect inside of a new horizon wherein everything is radically reinterpreted … God can flow into our lives pure and untainted when we are at an impasse and unable to substitute our vision for God’s vision. [T]he broken symbols, the disillusion, and our helplessness to think or feel our way out of the impasse is precisely what assures us that the new vision which is given to us comes from God and is not the product of own imagination or projection or self-interest.” (February 5, 2024)
I could “see” again. 2024 was a year of numerous costly counterculture decisions but with Shalom — a supernatural peace in spite of chaos and confusion. It had often felt more like being drawn into and carried by than to be surviving through how I should humanly feel.
2024, I have come such a long way in putting pen to paper of this all. Even as it’s cryptic as much of the defeat is complex and not just my own. Yet I am equally beyond hopeful as 2025 is the year to reap in the joy of Psalm 126:5, so more to come to light in the new year.
For now, from the deepest peace, strength and joy I am in, Happy 2025 :)
honest & hygge 