Turning Toward the Sun
Sketch by my sister, Shalini.
My sister Shalini showed me her colored-pencil sketch of a sunrise and said, "As I was drawing this and sitting with the Lord, I realized that the sun really isn't rising. The sun isn't moving at all. Sunrise is just the earth turning toward the sun."
That statement keeps coming back to me.
There have been times in my life when I have been barely hanging on, praying for relief. Waiting for the morning, when things will look different.
Scripture reinforces this hope that help comes in the morning. We read, “God will help her when morning dawns” (Psalm 46:5) and “joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5), and so we wait for the first rays of light. Psalm 130:6, the verse I used for my devotional, Watching for the Morning, says, "My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning."
When we are struggling, we're waiting for morning to come, waiting for our situation to look brighter.
I always thought waiting through the dark of night for morning simply involved the passage of time. While we don't know how long the night will last, we trust that eventually morning will come.
But what if morning can begin even before our circumstances change? What if it begins when we take our eyes off ourselves and our pain and turn toward God?
In the darkness, I have turned away ever so slightly and stopped meeting the gaze of God. I have slipped into depression and helplessness. I have wanted to give up hope because hoping felt too painful.
There was a season, the most difficult in my life, when I saw horror and fear everywhere I looked. My marriage had fallen apart, and everything I’d built seemed to crumble with it. I had known the Lord for years, but often my trust was intellectual. I still “knew” that he was sovereign and good, but my heart was in a different place.
I wondered how this could really be my life. And in those days, God felt a million miles away. He could have fixed it all with a word.
I wanted to turn away, wondering what was actually true. But the world offered no help. With nowhere else to go, I began crying out to God for mercy and relief. I turned to him, looking for hope. A sign that he was with me. A hint that he was in this. An assurance that he hadn't abandoned me.
I couldn't survive on other people's faith. I needed faith of my own.
I didn't have much clarity, but I began journaling my fears and doubts, begging God to draw near. "I look at happily married couples and I smile but inside I'm crying," I wrote in my journal. "I felt that you would bring restoration, for your name and for your glory. Now I feel you have let me down, led me along, let me hope in something that was not meant to be. Lord, this is breaking me and I cannot hold up under it. I need relief and I’m desperate.”
Scripture calls this lament, and lament begins with a turn toward God. We talk to him about whatever is hard, refusing to turn away. For me, that turn began with resolve and a prayer, asking God to help me trust him even when it felt like the earth was giving way. Even in the deepest darkness, when there were no glimmers of light.
Months later, I wrote:
"When I get angry at [him], rehearsing all the things he did and stewing in my anger, I realize I'm not looking to you. My eyes are fixed on myself. Then I thought of Peter. He could walk on water when his eyes were on Jesus. But when he took his eyes off Jesus and focused on the externals, he started to sink. . . . I cannot do this by myself. But as I read the word and pray, little by little, I am transformed. The weight of the burdens fall off. I lay them at your feet and then I feel lighter."
Peter's circumstances hadn't changed. The storm was there the entire time. But where he fixed his eyes made all the difference.
Slowly, as I kept turning toward God, I saw flickers of light. They were faint at first, but as I kept going to him, opening my Bible, sitting with him, and refusing to look away, the light grew stronger.
I was being changed.
My theology became reality as I met God in the depths of my pain. In those days, I felt like I was living in two worlds. One was exceedingly hard, with pain on every front. But the other was filled with an otherworldly delight that sustained me. God was unmistakably real, and I felt joy simply being with him.
That experience changed everything for me.
I went from knowing that the Bible was good for me, like medicine, to seeing it as a doorway to delight. I began to understand Jeremiah's words: "Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart" (Jeremiah 15:16).
God became my refuge and my delight.
And for the first time, I began to understand his delight in me.
My turning toward him hadn't changed his heart toward me. But as I kept turning, I began to see what had been true all along. I had glimpsed his face, and it was full of delight. When I’d looked away, I couldn't see it. But the delight had always been there.
I finally understood what it meant to be captivated by God, filled with awe and wonder. I was in love with God and wanted to hang on his every word. One of my favorite passages became Isaiah 62:4–5, where the Lord speaks of restoring Jerusalem after her devastation:
"You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her
… and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you.”
That passage is tear-stained and underlined in my Bible. Whenever I read it, I'm reminded of God's delight in his people and his delight in me. And experiencing his delight in me fuels my delight in him.
I recognize this was an extraordinary gift, one that not everyone experiences. Faithful people turn to God and may still not feel his presence; I have known seasons like that too. Then I must cling to God’s promises even tighter. His delight in me is constant, whether or not I see it. And that is true for all of us in Christ.
For me, the journey from desperation to delight begins with lament. With intentionally turning toward God in the dark night.
My circumstances do not suddenly change. The sun does not move.
But I turn toward it.