How Long is the Night?

"And the sorrow may last for the night,

but joy comes in the morning."

  

Or so sang the radio while the tears streamed down my face and the taillights danced and distorted in my blurring vision.  With a tight grip on the steering wheel and absolutely no grip on my life, I cried the river of a drama queen all the way down 270-south. And somewhere under that flood of teenage emotion a thought began eating its way into my heart.  A little thought.  An increasingly bitter thought, formed as a question: "how long, huh?"

How long is the night?

The cause of my tears that day was nothing spectacular or noteworthy.  Neither was the cause the day before, nor the day before that.  I don't think many of these causes are.  They usually avoid the theatrics and infest our hearts with humbler ingenuity. But whatever the route, they slip in through the fissures in our delicate, porcelain condition of "okay" and bubble up into salty poison, and we call it tears.  Tears that hurt because they mark out clearly our serpentine cracks like highways on a state map.  Because they shatter that flawless, glass figurine of ourselves and show us the pitiful creature left cowering inside. Because they just hurt, and sometimes we don't even have a reason.  

How long is the night?

"When I felt secure, I said,

    “I will never be shaken.”
…but when you hid your face,
    I was dismayed."

How long is the night?

    “Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning?"

How long is the night?

"Deep calls to deep
    at the roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves

have gone over me."

How long is the night?

"By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
    and at night his song is with me,
    a prayer to the God of my life."

How long is the night?

"To you, Lord, I called;
    to the Lord I cried for mercy…
 Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me;
    Lord, be my help.”

And I never found out how long the night is.  Sometimes the night seems so long you lose hope and slip a little because its pitch black and you can't see where you're going.  And all around things still seem pretty dark, but someday there will come a time when you look up and realize it got light all around you, and you didn't notice because you were busy staring at your shadow. And on that day you can open your eyes and more fully love the sun. 

I'm waiting for that joy.