… he sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” – Luke 7:19

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 2, 2017) Luke 7

I am convinced that the periods of darkness – what we might call the ‘dark nights of the soul’ – are just part of what it means to be alive. And as a result, I have a hard time believing those that want to sell me a gospel that says that God wants only a comfortable life for us – a life where everything is up, and nothing bad ever happens. The problem for me is that the Biblical record doesn’t seem to support that view of life. Repeatedly we find the Biblical heroes facing times of great depression and darkness, and if you doubt that – just take a walk through the Psalms – or read Ecclesiastes.

But it wasn’t just in the Old Testament that men of faith that suffered through the debilitating darkness. The last of the Old Testament Prophets is actually found in the New Testament. His name was John, and we know him as John the Baptist. He was chosen to be the forerunner of the Messiah. His job was to go into Israel with the message – The Messiah is on his way, repent and get your lives straight in the eyes of God. You are not going to want to miss this.

But as John’s life begins to close in on its endpoint, John starts to question everything that up until that point he had held as a certainty. All of the times when he had said to those around him – look over there, there is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, were gone. The baby that had leaped inside his mother’s womb because Mary – who was pregnant with Jesus at the time - had come by, now faced the other end of his life with a question. Jesus, are you the one – or should we be waiting for someone else. At one point I was sure, but now I am not.

Dark nights of the soul tend to do that to us – they make us question what was once a certainty in the bright light of the sun. And that doesn’t make us weak in our faith. John the Baptist – the prophet of God, the forerunner of Christ – questioned what he thought was a certainty during the high points of his life. Doubt simply makes us a part of the human race.

So if your day today is filled with doubt, welcome to humanity. The trick is to find your way through the dark night into the truth of the day. Jesus’ answer to John was a relatively simple – yes, I am the one.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Matthew 13