It is midnight. Not the kind of midnight measured by clocks. The kind that settles into your bones. The kind that lingers long after the sun has risen.
We all know this midnight.
Braxton Wade
It is the midnight of the marriage that ended long before the divorce papers were signed. It is the midnight of the doctor’s phone call that begins with the words, “I’m afraid the biopsy …” It is the midnight of watching your parents grow older and realizing the people who once carried you now need you to carry them.
It is the midnight of sitting in a career that pays the bills but slowly starves your soul. It is the midnight of another month when the rent is due before the paycheck arrives. It is the midnight of depression that steals your appetite for tomorrow. The midnight of anxiety that keeps you awake while the rest of the house sleeps. The midnight of praying for healing that has not yet come. The midnight of burying dreams you were certain God had planted in your heart.
Then there are the midnights we carry together.
The midnight of another school shooting. The midnight of another Black family grieving a child whose life ended far too soon. The midnight of immigrant communities wondering whether today is the day another family will be separated. The midnight of policies that leave vulnerable people wondering whether those in power see them as neighbors or problems to be solved.
“For many people, myself included, weeping lasts much longer than a single night.”
The midnight of transgender children asking whether there is room for them in a church that proclaims a gospel of love. The midnight of churches that have forgotten how to weep with those who weep. The midnight of scrolling past another tragedy before we’ve even finished our first cup of coffee. The midnight of an administration that further marginalizes those already on the margins.
We have become experts at consuming grief. We witness suffering, we react, we refresh, and we move on. But grief does not; grief lingers. It lingers beside hospital beds, it lingers in empty bedrooms, it lingers at gravesides and it lingers around dinner tables where one chair is suddenly empty. It also lingers in sanctuaries where pastors preach with broken hearts while wondering how many more funerals their congregation can bear.
Sooner or later, midnight finds all of us. And when it does, the easy answers begin to crumble.
That is when Psalm 30 begins to sound less like a declaration and more like a prayer we desperately want to believe: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”
I still believe those words. I believe them because I have seen “joy come in the morning.”
But I also know for many people, myself included, weeping lasts much longer than a single night.
Oftentimes, nights become seasons, and some seasons become years. The Bible never asks us to pretend otherwise. Its pages are soaked with lament.
“Lament isn’t a failure of our faith but rather lament is our faith refusing to let go of God.”
“How long, O Lord?” This cry echoes through Scripture because God has honored grief for centuries. Lament isn’t a failure of our faith but rather lament is our faith refusing to let go of God. Perhaps that is why the first name given to Jesus is not Deliverer, King, Savior or Miracle Worker. It is Emmanuel. God with us.
I can’t help but think about Mary, the mother of Jesus. When we think about the birth of Jesus and that holy night, we remember the angels, we remember the manger, we remember the shepherds. But before all that, there were months. Months of carrying a promise she could not yet see fulfilled.
How many midnights did Mary spend trying to find a comfortable position with Emmanuel growing inside her? How many nights did she wrestle with fear? How many nights did she wonder whether Joseph would remain beside her? How many nights did she carry the Prince of Peace while feeling anything but peaceful? How many nights did she bear God in her own body while still finding no room at the inn?
Sometimes you carry the promise before you experience the peace. Sometimes Emmanuel is growing within you while your life still feels painfully unresolved.
The miracle never was that Mary escaped the darkness. The miracle was that God entered it.
Then there’s Paul and Silas. Luke tells us only one thing about their suffering: “About midnight … .”
“Sometimes you carry the promise before you experience the peace.”
That’s all; he never tells us how many nights came before that one. How many nights had they already slept on cold stone in prison? How many prayers had gone unanswered? How many conversations had they shared in whispered voices after everyone else had fallen asleep? Yet Luke simply introduces them to us at midnight.
Perhaps because that is where so many of us live. And Luke says there, in the darkness, they prayed. I often have imagined those prayers sounding triumphant. Now I wonder whether they sounded exhausted.
Perhaps there were tears between the hymns. Perhaps there were questions inside the praise. Perhaps their worship was not the absence of lament but lament offered faithfully to God. Then the earth shook, the chains fell away and the prison doors opened. But the miracle did not end there. Paul and Silas did not run, they stayed. They remained among people who still were imprisoned, they refused a freedom that abandoned their neighbors. That detail has begun to haunt me, because too often the church has preached a gospel of escape. Get your blessing, get your breakthrough, get your miracle and check the box.
But the gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel of presence. The one we follow is Emmanuel — God with us. And if God is with us, then surely we are called to be with one another. To remain beside those whose morning has not yet arrived, to refuse the temptation to offer clichés where compassion is required, to sit beside the grieving without rushing them toward joy, to stand with communities pushed to the margins and to tell the truth about systems that wound God’s beloved while refusing to surrender to despair.
Perhaps Christian hope is not believing the night is shorter than it is. Perhaps Christian hope is believing that no matter how long the night lasts, God refuses to leave. Presence before deliverance, companionship before certainty and ultimately love before dawn.
So if joy has not come this morning, hear this: You have not failed. Your faith has not failed. God has not failed. The night may be longer than you imagined, but you do not walk through it alone.
And perhaps that is the church’s calling in an age of endless midnights — not to pretend the darkness is less dark, nor to promise a sunrise on our timetable, but to become an Emmanuel people. A people who stay, a people who tell the truth, a people who lament, a people who love and a people who refuse to leave anyone sitting alone in the darkness.
Until, by the grace of God, morning comes for us all.
Braxton Wade is a Clemons Fellow with BNG. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and Chicago Theological Seminary and lives in Richmond, Va.