There is a particular kind of darkness that is not made of shadows. It is made of silence, the silence after you have prayed everything you know how to pray, and the ceiling does not move, and the morning comes exactly the same as the night, and nothing has changed. That darkness is the hardest kind. Because you cannot fight silence. You cannot outrun it. You can only sit inside it and decide what you believe.

I have sat in that silence many times. On a church floor with my children sleeping beside me. In a small wooden house, while a cyclone moved through the distance. In a body wracked with pain that no medicine could touch. What I learned inside that silence became the most important thing I have ever learned.

The Anatomy of a Dark Moment

Dark moments have a particular structure that I have come to recognize over the years. They begin with a loss of a person, a home, a plan, a certainty. Then comes the disorientation: the world as you understood it no longer makes sense. Then the silence: when you reach for God and feel nothing. And then, if you stay long enough, if you do not run, something else happens. A stillness. A refusal to be consumed. A tiny, stubborn spark that refuses to go out.

That spark is strength. And it is always there. You just have to stop running long enough to find it.

“I believe that God watches over us, never allowing us to face more than we can bear. I feel it was a miracle – my time to live and to write my story.

You Are Allowed to Not Be Okay

One of the most damaging things religious and spiritual communities sometimes teach, and I say this with love, as someone who has found deep sustenance in faith, is that darkness is a sign of weakness or insufficient belief. That if you were truly faithful, you would not be afraid. That depression is doubt in disguise. That suffering is something to be ashamed of.

I reject this completely. The darkest chapters of my life were not the result of insufficient faith. They were the result of extraordinary difficulty, poverty, illness, loss, and displacement, circumstances that would have broken anyone. Being broken by them was not a weakness. Fighting through them, one agonizing hour at a time, was the greatest demonstration of strength I have ever witnessed, and I witnessed it in myself.

What Darkness Is Actually For

I have come to believe, and this belief was hard-won, paid for with years of struggle, that dark moments are not punishments. They are excavations. They dig out of you everything that was never really yours: the false certainties, the borrowed confidence, the peace that depended on external conditions. What remains after the excavation is real. It is solid. It is yours permanently.

Every dark moment I survived left me with something the light could not have given me. It left me with a knowledge of my own capacity that no success has ever matched. Because success tells you what you can achieve. But survival tells you who you actually are.

Practical Anchors for Dark Moments

When I was in my darkest times, I found that certain anchors kept me from going under. I offer them to you not as a prescription but as possibilities, things that held me when I could not hold myself.

Memory: I would go back to the white horse. To the fields at dawn. To the sound of my grandmother’s voice telling stories. Memory can be a lifeline. It is proof that beauty has existed in your life and, therefore, can exist again.

One Person: In every dark season, there was someone who showed up. A neighbor. A church community. My mother. My sister. Find the one person. Hold onto them. Let them hold onto you. We were never meant to survive alone.

Smallness: When the large things- the house, the future, and the questions- were too overwhelming, I would make myself very small. I would focus only on the next hour. The next meal. The next step. The darkness cannot live in a space that small. It needs room to fill. Give it none.

“The darkest moment of your life is not your ending. It is your foundation. Build on it.”

— Luci Partela