Finding Faith In The Dark Night Of The Soul In 2025

Have you ever faced a dark night of the soul? A “dark night of the soul” is when you ask hard questions like, “Does it matter what I do with my life?” “Is there any meaning in my suffering?” “Does God love me?” These are times in life when doubt is loud, and life is hard. Jesus faced a literal and spiritual dark night of the soul. It was so stressful that it physically manifested, His sweat becoming like drops of blood. If God did not keep Jesus from experiencing such a difficult time, we can expect that we might experience one as well. Let’s take a look at how faith offers an answer to these questions.

Jesus’ Dark Night of the Soul

If you have been following along in this series, you have heard about the faith in the Book of Daniel and the lack of faith by Jesus’ closest friends. The night before Jesus experienced death on the cross, he celebrated the Passover meal. From Moses to Jesus, generation to generation participated in a reminder that God saves. And yet, Jesus transformed the meaning again, explaining that God was about to bring salvation in a new way. After the meal, Jesus and his disciples went to the garden to pray.

Why are you sleeping?

Jesus is praying—not just praying, but the hardest prayer He has ever prayed. And the disciples have fallen asleep. Truthfully, we humans aren’t very good at knowing when we are facing a storm we can rest through and when we should pray through the night. If we aren’t careful, we turn every storm threatening our comfort into something much bigger. Then we turn around and sleepwalk through the most difficult times we face. Part of our lifelong struggle will be learning to discern the difference. Jesus knew, and He needed His friends to keep watch. But they didn’t understand the moment, so they didn’t stay awake. There is a beautiful symmetry to these two stories. When Jesus was sleeping, the disciples were filled with fear and anxiety. When Jesus needed them to stay awake because of the strain He was under, they slept.

I don’t know how your 2024 was, but my wife and I faced some storms. And I am learning how to trust God through those storms. I have been asking for wisdom to understand the twists and turns that make up my life journey. If we let them, storms will rob us of joy, hope, and faith, especially when we view them through a lens that magnifies the hard parts and minimizes the growth of our faith. In 2025, my goal (and your goal) should be to develop the wisdom to discern storms in our lives. As we ask, may we learn how to rest and pray.

You are Not Alone

Storms and dark nights can create crises and questions in your life. One of the first ways we try to relate to God and sense His love is to base it on how our life is going. This is especially true in America, where we elevate comfort and success over every other metric. When life is good, we know God loves us. But when the storms come, what does that mean? In terms of God’s love, it means very little. God loves us because that is simply who He is. A triangle has three sides. You could call a four-sided shape a triangle, but you would be wrong. Similarly, one of God’s defining characteristics is that He loves us. Despite what we do and above and beyond what we are going through.

The simplest level is to believe that God’s love is best demonstrated through unmerited blessing. But we must move beyond the simple and into a more mature understanding of what it means to follow God. That is how we will grow in faith. Human parents love their children, yet they don’t just give them everything they want or ask for. We know that doing so would be unloving to a child. The most loving thing to do is to let your child struggle. If you don’t, they won’t grow and mature. The world’s complexities, with 7.9 billion souls on it, are simply mind-numbing. So we may never understand why what happens to us happens to us, but we can know that God loves us. And He demonstrates that by promising to never leave us or forsake us. You may be in a storm or a dark night in your soul, but you are not alone.

Not My Will

Jesus understands when we struggle and suffer through anxiety-filled moments. He lived one. He knew what was coming, and His human side didn’t want to go through the experience. When we find ourselves amid difficult storms or even the dark night of the soul, we often wonder if the life we live matters. Is there any difference in how I live my life?

God’s Will?

Today, we value freedom over almost any other ideal. We live in America, meaning you can’t tell us what to do or think. We have gone from the age of relative truth to the age of alternate facts. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but don’t you dare try to impose your beliefs on me. And so we search, as humans always have, for meaning and purpose in this world. But that search becomes more difficult when we remove all the guardrails, and you can do whatever you want. And what about God? Does what He wants matter? Can we even know what God wants?

When people ask what God’s will is for my life, they most often want a play-by-play depiction of what will happen. But I think Paul, in Romans 12, gives us a better way to think of God’s will. Paul has spent the first 11 chapters on what God has, is, and will do. Then, he urges us to seek the will of God by offering up our bodies as living sacrifices. God’s will is for us to live like Jesus more and more every day. Jesus left so that the Holy Spirit could come to live in our hearts and empower us to live as He did. Knowing God’s will looks less like what job I should get or who I should marry and more like how I can love like Jesus today. Jesus reminded us to seek first the things of heaven, and the other things would be added.

Meaningful Surrender

Jesus said what we often want to say: God, I don’t want to. And man, it would have been amazing if He had stopped there. But He didn’t. He said, “Not my will, but yours.” Faith demands that we believe that how we live our lives matters. The choices we make, the words we say, and the actions we take all have meaning and should not be taken lightly. The work Paul talks about in Romans that God is doing, we are invited to be co-laborers. And it doesn’t matter where you work or live or if you have money, power, or influence. What matters is if you surrender to how life is meant to be lived. When we become kingdom-focused, we develop the eyes to see storms and dark nights as they truly are. Opportunities to learn how to surrender and grow to help advance God’s kingdom wherever we are. We learn what it means to pray like Jesus: If there is any other way, let that be the way. But not my will, God, Yours.

My wife and I joined a club that no one ever wanted to be in. Walking through cancer changes you, and it separates you from those who haven’t experienced it. Any disease or tragedy will. Talk to someone who has lost a child, had a miscarriage, or experienced any numb4er of tragedies. Those things change you and will shape how you see the world. My wife is still working through recovery, even though she had just three months of treatment focused on the actual cancer. We are walking in a new world of medications and side effects and doctor’s visits and finding a new normal. But even now, I can see how God is using my wife’s experience to be able to be Jesus to more people. In November, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, and my wife was able to connect and support her. There will be others, and as we submit to God’s will, He will continue to find ways to use that surrender.

Finding Faith in 2025

How we walk through our lives makes a difference. We don’t often get to choose the journey, but we do get to choose how we walk—and who we walk with. Take some time this week to reflect on how you want to walk in 2025 and ask yourself who you are walking with. Remember, you are not alone. God will walk with you, even in the darkest of valleys. There will be good times this year, and even if things don’t go exactly how you want, God is still at work. Your faith will shape your belief. Your beliefs will shape your thoughts. And your thoughts will shape how you live. Whether in fires, storms, or dark nights of the soul, our calling is to be living sacrifices collaborating in building God’s kingdom. And if we can focus on doing just that, that joining in with what God is already at work doing, that will be enough.