Singing in the Dark

by Ginny Owens

  To complement my put-together exterior, I, as a southern-born blind girl, have learned that the most important vibe to give off is that I’m okay. That I’m as put together, as pristine, and as positive on the inside as I am on the outside. To mention that I am not okay would not be okay. To mention that I am dark on the inside would make people squirm.

  My gut says it isn’t just me who aims to present well and is slow to come forth with the truth. What about you? Do you aim to always be okay? Do you feel the weight of your darkness—mean thoughts, unmentionable desires, things you’ve done that you pray no one discovers? Do you keep trying to do things differently and keep tripping up? We watch as we cross lines we swore we’d never cross—or would never cross again. We hear ourselves saying things we regret even as they flow out of our mouths. We wonder what came over us.

  Why do we do these things? And how do we stop?

  I believe King David has some answers for us. During one of his darkest seasons, a time when he had essentially wronged everyone he knew and turned wholeheartedly from God, he was awakened by the words of a close friend who spoke God’s truth to him. As we consider his story, we will discover why our hope and power lie in lamenting before the Lord about our misoriented lives.

  I will also share with you my own story of turning away from God—and how I returned to Him to discover true freedom and restoration.

  Why Must We Talk about Sin?

  The Bible is full of prayers and stories about human depravity and failure, but many of us avoid these passages in our personal study. And we rarely hear them at church. Instead, we set our focus on the Lord’s love and grace. We have good reason: Grace is the most beautiful and encouraging news! Also, we know what damage churches have done by hyperfocusing on sin. The church has long been infamous for its legalism and judgment instead of its generosity and love. And many have deep wounds because of the damage done.

  But here’s something I’ve learned: unless we know how desperately off the path we are, grace means little more than a fleeting, “warm hug” feeling. When we catch a vision of how much self-imposed darkness we’ve been rescued from, grace explodes our hearts with joy and deep gratitude because God has given us Himself and set us free from our chains of sin.

  So in this chapter we will find our way to costly grace and sweet freedom. But first I need to walk us through the darkness of sin to get there.

  There is darkness in every human heart. Even those who are not convinced of God’s existence know this from personal experience. We spend our lives trying to manage the darkness inside through perfecting habits like self-discipline, constructive thinking, and positive self-talk. No doubt all these traits help us navigate and thrive in life. But for any of us who have been relentlessly trying to bring our wills into submission this way, we know how often we fall off the wagon. We lose our tempers. We have many moments of weakness and do things we regret.

  We can see we will never make it to perfection at the rate we’re going.

  The shame we feel for not being self-disciplined enough weighs on us—often even more than sin itself. We need someone outside ourselves, not only to supernaturally conquer our self-imposed darkness of heart but also to lift the burden of it and carry away our guilt and shame once and for all.

  This is why King David has much to teach us about singing to God of the nightmare our sin has brought about—until He restores us, empowering us to sing of true joy and worship again. Psalm 51, as Derek Kidner helpfully offered, “comes from David’s blackest moment of self-knowledge, yet it explores not only the depths of his guilt but some of the farthest reaches of salvation.”1

  Several of King David’s sins made it into his story, but the most well-known are his affair with Bathsheba, a married woman, and his subsequent ordering of her husband Uriah’s murder. After Uriah had been killed, David married his widow. In 2 Samuel 11, David—the humble shepherd, the wise king, and the author and singer of many of our favorite songs of hope—found himself drowning in sin before he knew what was happening. He covered it all up at first, but then Nathan, God’s prophet—aka David’s accountability partner—called him out. Once his sin was exposed, David grieved over it before the Lord, and he found his hope restored.

  David’s actions had many consequences, not least of which is that we’re still talking about his sin three thousand years later. But the consequence of his song of repentance is that we learn how to run from our sin, guilt, and shame into the arms of One who can drive them as far as the east is from the west and restore us to wholeness.

  The Hazy Season

  I remember a season in which the need for such a song became more real to me than ever.

  When I say I lived in a haze for a season, I mean my (figurative) vision was never clear. My mental calculator was off. My wisdom had gone missing. Everything was everyone else’s fault. I was afraid of things I should have been thankful for and unmotivated to take advantage of great opportunities. God seemed nowhere to be found. And church, I was certain, was not the place to find Him. It was full of hypocrites.

  There might have been a modicum of truth in these feelings, but it was just enough to be twisted into lies I delighted in nursing.

  I remember how my life unraveled before me in that season, again and again, until I felt helpless, anxious, and desperately alone. I remember the endless nights of lying on the floor with many tears. I remember how the glass of wine I occasionally enjoyed turned into several glasses of wine I needed to cope with the darkness.

  The tears eventually began to flow less frequently, and the nights became less traumatic, but the perpetual haze I wandered around in lingered long.

  What I remember most about that time was that I brought the darkness entirely on myself. My failure—my sin—temporarily wrecked my happiness and my peace. Thanks to me, my song of hope was replaced with a disgruntled, deflated song.

  I didn’t just wake up one day and make a huge, dumb decision. No, I took one small step after another in a dumb direction until I was in over my head. Until life felt out of control and I couldn’t find my way back to the right path.

  Even now, all these years later, I cringe at the helpless feeling I get just writing about this. I live in a place of hope and true freedom now, but the consequences of my actions still reverberate. I regret the friendships I dismissed, the foolish lies I believed, and the time I wasted.

  On the other side of that season, I remember one Sunday at Watermark Community Church in Dallas when Pastor Todd Wagner brought onstage a tiger cub from a tiger refuge park. Since I was leading worship that day, I had a chance to interact with the cub offstage. It was cute and cuddly, but months later, when Todd went to visit his friend at the park, that same white Siberian tiger was already hundreds of pounds; it was soon shipped off to a zoo because even those who raised it and fed it every day were unable to control it.

  In his sermon, Todd likened the baby tiger to sin. They both start out small—cute and cuddly, if you will. There is an appeal in petting them. But eventually the tiger and the sin will grow up to eat you alive. The literal scratches I carried on my arms for the next couple of weeks reminded me of that truth.

  Alienation: Sin Makes Us Strangers

  One of the ways we can recognize that sin is growing in our lives is that it alienates us from our rhythms of responsibility, from those we love, and most of all from God. In 2 Samuel 11, we find David lazing in his palace bed until late into the evening and then strolling around on his roof (vv. 1–2). After years of being responsible, David had apparently decided to take a long king’s vacation.

  Time off is often much needed, but as we read on, we see clearly that this was more than time off—it was shirking. David should have been tending to his kingly duties, overseeing his military as they defended Israel. Instead, during his leisurely jaunt on the roof, he spotted Bathsheba bathing, and he immediately had her brought to him. He slept with her and sent her home.

  This was all out of character for David. Bathshe
ba and the servant who accompanied her to the palace and home again must have wondered at their king’s behavior.

  When Bathsheba ended up pregnant, David called Uriah, her husband, home from war so it would look like Bathsheba’s baby was her husband’s. Uriah shows us how David should have acted. Uriah wouldn’t go home for leisure, not when the nation was at war. Loyal to his army and his country, he slept outside the palace. The next day, David got him drunk in the hope that he would go home to his wife.

  Upstanding Uriah still refused to go home. So on the third day, David sent him back to war carrying a note to the captain, commanding that Uriah be left vulnerable on the front line of the battle.

  Who is this David? Joab, the army captain, must have wondered what had gotten into him. Uriah, the innocent one, was soon killed, and David quickly went through with a wedding to his widow.

  Lives were destroyed, other people were forced to do David’s dastardly deeds, and most of all, the Lord’s justice was violated. In his song of repentance, David sang woefully, “Against you—you alone—I have sinned” (Ps. 51:4).

  David knew he had failed God’s call to love Him with heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love and honor humanity. In his state of slothfulness, he had turned his heart to his own interests and onto the path of sin, which led him further from God’s voice. The shepherd-king, who had once allowed himself to be led by his Shepherd-God and who had protected and guided his people, had become a dangerous wolf—a stranger to all that was good.

  Though King David’s life and his place in history are quite different from ours, the story of how sin crouched at his door and broke in resonates with most of us. It sure does with me.

  My most memorable season of sin began during the time when I was on the road nonstop. I left little space for worship, for true community, or for authentic, vulnerable connection with close friends. Sure, I had friends who shared my Christian perspective whom I kept in touch with, but I was careful not to tell them what I didn’t want them to know.

  I listened to sermons often, and I read lots of Christian books. Our crew prayed together before shows and sometimes at other times too. But when it came to intentionality with God, I was a sloth. My primary focus was work, not my friendship with Him. As a result, my priorities and perspective began to change. Soon the people most frequently speaking into my life were completely work-focused and not focusing on God at all, just like I was. Nesting comfortably in the armpit of cultural Christianity, I thought I was doing just fine.

  I began to drift away from my most solid friends. I ate, slept, and breathed my career. My aim was not to be the most successful in the world—just to do my job well. So I didn’t see my work ethic as out of bounds. I was missing the truth that my ultimate purpose had become work instead of honoring the One who gave me that work. Though my mind believed the words I sang every night, my heart was quickly forgetting how to trust their power. I was not excited about truth. I had become a stranger to God. My prayers were no longer personal but merely polite.

  Polite Prayers

  One of the things I love about the Psalms, especially those of David, is how vulnerable and brutally honest they teach us to be before God. David never held anything back, which I take as a call for us to follow suit.

  In the earliest days of my career, I had taken every decision to God. But as life grew more hectic and as things went well, I consulted Him less and less. I was drinking from a fire hose of activity. I didn’t have time to discern my path forward by sitting and talking to Him through reading and prayer.

  Of course, I did have time. What I did not have was the patience or desire.

  I remember telling my mom several times that God had given me this career opportunity and He had also given me the mental tools to make it work. Of course, there was an ounce of truth in that. I was responsible to work hard and be wise. But had I made space for friendship with God, He would have guided me through the details.

  With this attitude, my prayers morphed over time from impassioned to civil. When I prayed, it was half-hearted and without expectation that God would answer. This take on things influenced every prayer. I asked for wisdom in making business decisions and navigating difficult situations but never took time to be still and seek it out. When nothing changed, I took it as the Lord not caring about the details, and I gave up asking for wisdom. I longed to get married, but the Lord didn’t seem to be answering that prayer either. So I stopped asking.

  When my prayers became superficial and I no longer trusted God enough to lay before Him all my longings, I naturally began entrusting my heart to other loves.

  Needless to say, this had catastrophic consequences. A couple of dating relationships I had no business being in led to breakups that reverberated through years of heartache. Work stress mounted too as I completed my record deal and tried to plan my next steps. It was all up to me, after all.

  I was not who I had been before. I became a stranger to my rhythms of responsibility, my closest friends, and my most faithful Lord.

  As David said, this is what we are prone to. He sang to God, “Indeed, I was guilty when I was born; I was sinful when my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5). In other words, our natural bent is to turn from what is good, from what God wants, to what we want. And being human and finite, we can’t see the far-reaching consequences that will come as a result.

  But God in His mercy never wants us to remain in that darkened state. He will wake us up any way He can. And usually He does it by sending someone to sound the alarm.

  The Wake-Up Call

  In 2 Samuel 12, we hear what happened after David married Bathsheba. God sent the prophet Nathan to the palace. He called David out with a heart-wrenching story of a poor man who bought a little lamb, which became his beloved family pet. Then a rich man came along and stole it and ate it for dinner instead of taking one from his numerous flocks.

  David was infuriated, his passion for justice instantly ignited. Then Nathan delivered the kicker: David was that heartless rich man. God had given David everything, and He demanded to know why David had despised Him by believing the lie that something was missing.

  Does this sound familiar? In the garden of Eden, the serpent told Eve that God was lying and that eating fruit from the beautiful, forbidden tree would merely make her as smart as God. He told her that God had forbidden it because He didn’t want the competition (Gen. 3:1–5). Sin is believing the lie that God has not actually been good and has not given us what we really need. As He did with Adam and Eve in the garden, God in His justice insisted on intense consequences for David’s sin. But just as He did in the garden, God showed mercy, sparing David’s life.

  God often communicates His love and friendship to us through care and concern from others. After Nathan delivered his word from the Lord, everything changed. The session of honest communication moved David from a mental space of lying, hiding, and sneaking around to open confession. David confessed to Nathan and then to the Lord, falling on His mercy. Often it is this sort of confrontation that helps us see that the baby tiger we should have run from in the beginning is now eating us alive.

  One of my best friends, Charlynn, did this for me. We had met on day one of college, and I quickly learned that Charlynn was not only the life of the party but also a most dedicated and honest friend.

  As I told her the joys and woes of the relationship I was in at the time, she boldly called me out. “What are you doing, Ginny? This is not where you should be, and you know it.” Even in my post-relationship misery, she lovingly reminded me that I had brought this on myself, that I could not blame anyone else, and that it would take time to heal. She and my other closest friends rose to the task of loving me and speaking truth I needed to hear about my personal life and career.

  It took a good bit of time to come out of the haze, but one of the things that helped was being accountable to these friends and people in pastoral roles. And confession brought me to see the many ways I had been wrong and helped me turn the c
orner toward truth. Over time, having honest people around me cleared the fog and allowed me to regain my vision.

  The Transformation: Falling on Mercy

  The beautiful thing we see in David’s psalm is that he knew that in order to be forgiven and changed, to be released from the weight of guilt and shame, and to be able to praise again, he had to first fall on God’s mercy. He cried out for the Lord to take action because he knew this was his only hope: “Be gracious to me, God, according to your faithful love; according to your abundant compassion, blot out my rebellion. Completely wash away my guilt and cleanse me from my sin” (Ps. 51:1–2).

  David now knew how horrific his sin was. He knew that he deserved judgment, but he also knew that the Lord had made a covenant promise to love His people and forgive them when they turned to Him (Ex. 34:7). He knew that his sins would define him unless the Lord’s love redefined him. He would never be able to do enough to cleanse himself—only the God of justice and mercy could wash him clean.

  We often think we can rid our lives of sin and guilt by striving to be good. We think that somehow our good deeds can overpower our failures.

  I remember a strange response I had during my dark season: I heard the noise of guilt in absolutely everything. I would pay for dinners I didn’t need to pay for or go to great lengths to please people who weren’t even asking. I was trying to earn my way back to feeling good about myself. And back into God’s favor. As David said, my sin was ever before me (Ps. 51:3).

  When I finally got the memo that my task was impossible, that only God Himself was powerful enough to wash away the dirt of sin and to silence the voices of guilt and shame, I was deeply relieved. Falling on His mercy, realizing He was my only hope, was the first step to becoming free again.