What We Find When We Ask, God, Where Are You?

There’s an account in Scripture, in the book of Acts, about the apostle Paul’s own dark night. Luke’s second scroll tells it like this:

Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. Acts 16:6-10

Maybe you notice a repeated refrain:

“Having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word [there] . . .”

“The Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to . . .”

Paul and his crew were trying to follow their calling, their mission, yet God thwarted their efforts. God changed their direction. God stopped them in their tracks. God blocked their goal. They thought their feet would take them one way, but the Spirit of Jesus had other plans.

This passage of Scripture almost reads like a cosmic joke, a deistic pinball machine. God was obscuring Paul’s path, even as he was inviting the apostle to follow sightlessly. Paul was given a dream, a vision, but he did not have a map. Still, Paul took one step of faith at a time, while God moved him in unexpected, tedious, and seemingly ridiculous directions.

And yet.

What we see in Paul’s story is often what we cannot see in our own, especially when we find ourselves in the middle of an obscure evening. God is at work, even when the path is dim. God is doing something, something good, even when we can’t see clearly. God’s past faithfulness—in Scripture, in our own stories, in the stories of other fellow travelers—can give us something to hold onto when our own belief feels hard.

All along, God was awakening Paul from his former naiveté, exploding out of the boxes Paul had placed him in. God used this journey, in all its disorientation, to reveal that he works in ways bigger than the apostle might have imagined, in and through people he might not have imagined: in Gentiles and in women, outside the institution, outside the religious elite. Paul dreamt of a Macedonian man but was eventually led to Lydia, who became one of the first female leaders of the early church. In this way, God’s obscurity served as Paul’s invitation into an entirely new trajectory, one where he would co-labor with women for the gospel as he continued to preach that gospel to Gentiles.

Perhaps for us, like for Paul and his companions, every God, where are you? is a step toward greater goodness, meaning, depth.

I cling to my tentative hypothesis that in the night, we are being invited into transformation. But I can’t quite land on my thesis because the darkness doesn’t feel particularly helpful or transformative. Mostly, the dusk is presenting a harrowing question: Can I fumble forward in faith, even if I cannot find the place where God is hiding?

God is up to something, even as we search for him in the obscurity of dusk. But it’s something many of us weren’t prepared for in our spiritual formation or church upbringing. In his hiddenness, God is inviting us to release certainty, which is scary.

We are asked, instead, to embrace faith, which is scarier.