why the dark before the dawn?

Further thoughts on Advent

I find myself continually wading through my own clouded thoughts related to the advent season as I want to better understand this period of waiting. I must admit waiting doesn’t come easily for me. I’ve realized lately how often I check my watch and how impatient I grow when I have to wait for things. I am a terrible waiter.

Last week we finished off our first semester of the program with a mere fifteen-hour road trip. With this in mind we left early in the morning in order to arrive in good time, and to miss the early morning rush hour. And so it was that I found myself awake (although I will admit, barely awake) and behind the wheel at 4:30 in the morning. Usually I love this time of day, and thrive on the solitude that comes from knowing I am among the few human beings awake. But this particular day I found myself caught in, what seemed like, an endless darkness that did its best to trap me. My eyes grew weary from staring at the red running lights of the vehicle in front of me, trying their best to try to lull me into a state of sleep, which I somehow resisted. Despite our east-bound direction, towards the sun’s hiding place, it seemed as if dawn would never arrive. Almost like the sun had made the decision to sleep the day away, as if it would be dark forever and the light that would bring reprieve, would never come.

Then, some three hours into the journey, the sky gradually lightened and the lifeless black was replaced by a constantly changing canvas of the morning’s hues. As this transformation took place the words to the following song I was listening to caught my attention.

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Still waiting for the dawn, the sun is coming up
The sun is coming up on the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, tell me now
Why the dark before the dawn?


Why the dark before the dawn?

Why the period of waiting for something so sure, regular and rhythmic?

A question I had been subconsciously asking myself for three hours, or perhaps more realistically for weeks. It made me wonder what it must have been like for the Jews some 2000 years ago as they found themselves in a time of waiting. What would it look like to wait for the fulfillment of a promise filled with such hope that it shaped their identity? Generation after generation they were to wait. Wait for a promise to take on flesh and walk with them.

They waited and waited and waited.

There’s nothing Fairy Tale about their waiting either. They often felt they had been forgotten and tried to take things into their own hands or they themselves forgot the promise altogether. But for me Israel’s story is not one of failure, but of hope. It encourages me that in the midst of all my doubt and unbelief, all the times I try to twist the hand of God into working the way I want Him to when I want him to, after all the tears I shed as I selfish child, that the same God who remembered His people will also remember me.

And so in this time of waiting I pray that God will teach me to wait well. To learn to trust Him more, little by little, to see the goodness that takes shape in the darkness of night. To value the process, the questions and the prayers that only seem to form as I wait. Slowly I’m coming to recognize value in waiting and the perspective it grants after having been in the dark long enough to appreciate the light, and blink at the brilliance of the morning’s sun marking a new day.

Slowly but surely I’m beginning to understand why the dark before the dawn.

(Song lyrics from “Yahweh” From the U2 album How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb)