You feel alone with trouble expanding faster than you can cope. Your strength is leaking away like water from a broken jar. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. Or you do know, and it’s not good. You see no light at tunnel’s end, just thick darkness all around and closing in.

Many of you reading don’t feel this way, thankfully, but I know some of you do. It’s very difficult to walk in darkness. It’s frightening, even terrifying.

Jesus knows how you feel because he felt the same way. “Why are you so far from saving me?” a psalm written for him asks. “I cry day by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:1-2). That’s what it’s like to walk in darkness. He understands!

When you’re in darkness and have no light, that’s the time, more deeply than ever, to “trust in the name of the Lord” and to “rely on” God. The Hebrew text uses a very interesting word for trust that means to “lean on for support.” Rest your weight on him.

Perhaps that’s all you are able to do just now. It is, anyway, what you should do. Let him reach down from his light to your darkness, hold you up, and walk with you.

You can walk with him through difficulty and trial. He is faithful. Darkness doesn’t last forever. He does.

Lord, I need your help. I need you. I want to trust you, and I do. I choose to lean on you and ask you to carry me through to the other side of my troubles. Amen.

For Today: Take encouragement from these words in the very next chapter of Isaiah. “The redeemed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall obtain gladness and joy and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 51:11). Perhaps the journey seems long now, but one day it will be over forever.



Tags: trust God Isaiah 50
Photo Credit: Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash