Calling on God in the Darkness

My four-year old son Isaac has reached the "fearful" stage of development. This is a completely normal thing, but a very unpleasant happening. All of a sudden, the world becomes scary. The imagination goes into overload. Nightmares become routine. "Mama, don't leave me! Come lay with me!" His fears are real and my job becomes trying to comfort him while at the same time helping him to realize he has nothing to fear. The shadows really aren't scary monsters coming to get him. The dreams aren't real. Everything is OK.

My boys and I say what they call the "bad prayers" every night - basically prayers to God for protection from bad things like fires and burglers and things that especially scare them like tornados and tsunamis. We pray for no bad dreams. A while back, we found out that Raphael the Archangel is the patron saint of nightmares, so we pray to him for added protection as well.

The night is scary. I say my own "bad prayers" before I go to sleep at night. I rest better knowing that I have placed myself and my family in God's hands. But it is not only physical darkness that scares us and leaves us feeling vunerable. Emotional darkness does that as well.

When our lives our falling apart, when we are suffering from abandonment, depression, or loneliness, when people we trust have failed us, we are in the darkness of life. As much as we might like it to be, life is not always happy. There are days in the desert for all of us. While we always need God, these are the times that we seem to need God most.

When we are in the darkness, we have reached the end of our personal resources to deal with the situation. When we go to sleep at night in the physical darkness, we are out of control and need to trust that the morning will come. In the emotional darkness, we need to turn our lives over completely to God and wrap ourselves in His love, trusting that someday the light will once again come.