Go public

Three of My Most Beloveds are suffering a type of “darkness.” Ongoing, severe pain surrounds them.

You and I have struggled in the darkness, too, for various reasons—loneliness, despair, ruin, failure, grieving.…

Yet within that darkness, God has messages for us. Within that darkness He tells you and me many things.

F.B. Meyer believed that in such times, God “tells us His secrets.”

That reminds me of God’s precious words in Isaiah 45:3, “I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord…”(NIV).

God, in His goodness, fulfills divine purposes through our darkness.

Furthermore, Meyer said,

“We are not meant to always linger in the dark.…” And when the right time comes to step out of the darkness, “we are to speak and proclaim what we have learned.”

That’s one of the things we do at Spiritual Memoirs 101! Here we look back and trace the ways God used our heartaches (and our joys, too, of course) to teach us about Himself and His love and His power to help—and then we put those lessons in writing for our memoirs.

Meyer’s words will sound old fashioned to you, but they are full of inspiration:

God calls “His child to the higher altitudes of fellowship, that he may hear God speaking face to face, and bear the message to his fellows at the mountain foot.”

“Were the forty days wasted that Moses spent on the Mount, or the period spent at Horeb by Elijah, or the years spent in Arabia by Saul?

“There is no short cut to the life of faith.… We must have periods of lonely meditation and fellowship with God.… Thus alone can the sense of God’s presence become the fixed possession of the soul, enabling it to say repeatedly, with the Psalmist, ‘Thou art near, O God’ [Psalm 119:151]” (emphasis mine; F.B. Meyer, quoted by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman, Streams in the Desert).

Take a few days or weeks to look back on your dark days—your Moses-like time on the Mount, your Elijah-like time in Horeb, your Saul-like time in Arabia—and discover that your hardships were not wasted years!

Find God’s treasures and His purposes in those difficult phases of your life. Discover the blessings that resulted.

What secrets did He whisper that you couldn’t have heard in eras of ease and seasons of sunshine? How did your life and faith change as a result?

"What God told you in the dark, speak (write) in the daylight; what He whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs” (Matthew 10:27), or, as Eugene Peterson worded it in The Message, “Go public.”

Think back to people who “went public,” people who shared their stories with you during your dark days.

Now it’s your turn to pass on the good deed because your kids, grandkids, great-grands, and your other readers will experience their own dark days. God can use your stories to help them. What important messages, hope, and wisdom can you share with them? Go public. Write your stories!