Luminous Dark: Leaning into Pain, Holding onto God, Breaking Through to Light

by Alain Emerson

Alain Emerson felt like the luckiest man in the world. A talented young pastor of a thriving church and national director of a prayer movement, he had found and married Lyndsay, the girl of his dreams, his soul mate.

He could never have imagined that, in a matter of months, he would be nursing his beautiful twenty-three-year-old bride through the final stages of cancer, and that at the age of only twenty-seven he would find himself a widower, distraught and alone. The faith that had once seemed firm and secure began to crumble. And then there were the questions. Hadn’t he been faithful and obedient? Why had God not answered his prayers? Why was God silent now? Why?

Alain realized that in order for his faith to survive, he needed to face God, not hold Him at arm's length. Like Jacob, he had to wrestle, and like Job, he had to voice his pain and disappointment. He had to lean into the pain.

In this profound exploration of loss, Emerson walks through the stages of grief and the shock of choosing to face God with his disappointment. He experiences the bewildering silence of God, the absence of simple answers, and the dark tunnel of despair. Taking great comfort from the Psalms and the work of writers who truly understand grief--Elie Wiesel, Walter Brueggemann, Jürgen Moltmann--Emerson wrestles with God and with his sorrow, and emerges with a deeper understanding and knowledge of God, a stronger and deeper faith, and a sense of having seen His face.