Many of us have had the experience of waking up in the early hours of the morning and finding ourselves overwhelmed with fear and negative thoughts. Those early hours are when our natural rhythms are at their lowest point in the daily cycle, and we, consequently, are at our most vulnerable emotionally. It’s also the time when we find our faith most sorely tested. You have to work hard at believing when you are at your lowest emotionally; but in actual fact, that’s what true faith is. It’s hanging on, even when it’s only by your finger nails.
That’s what the psalmist in the Bible was doing when he kept saying to himself, ‘Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him…’ He was reminding himself that it won’t always be like this; as some wise person once said: ‘Remember in the darkness what you knew in the light.’