What God Said to Me in the Darkest Season of My Life
Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day. | Psalm 139:12
5/19/2026
What God Said to Me in the Darkest Season
of My Life
Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day. | Psalm 139:12
I did not always know what it felt like to be held by God. For a long time, I only knew what it felt like to be without the person who held me together.
My siblings and I were raised by a single mother. She was the best of us, my primary cheerleader, the one who kept the world from feeling too large. My senior year of High School, exactly one year after we had been reunited with her, she was killed in a hit-and-run by someone under the influence. In an instant, the person who mattered most was gone.
How I finished that year, I cannot fully explain. I grieved deeply for over a year. I graduated in the top ten of my class. Only God could have carried me through that. I went on to college far from everyone I knew, and that distance, which felt like exile at the time, turned out to be a divine appointment.
The Night Everything Became Too Heavy
My first semester in college was harder than I had expected. One night, alone with my grief and without the anchors I had always relied on, I found myself unable to see a way forward. I seriously contemplated whether life was still worth continuing. I cried myself to sleep.
What happened next I can only describe as an encounter.
In that sleep I had a dream so vivid I can still describe every detail. I saw a hand stretched out toward me, an invitation to take hold of it. I did not hesitate. In the moment I reached for it, something happened inside me that I did not have language for yet. There was peace. The kind that had no logical explanation given everything I was carrying. And in that moment there was a promise. That He would hold me. That He would not let go.
The Inner Shift That Changed Everything
I woke up different. Not because my circumstances had changed. The grief was still there. The uncertainty was still there. But something had shifted on the inside, and that inner shift was the beginning of everything the world would eventually see from the outside.
I became hungry to know the God who had met me there. I had known of God my whole life but I had never experienced Him like this. I picked up my Bible and started from the beginning, Genesis to Revelation, and started over when I finished. Each time I read I saw dimensions of love I had never encountered before. I saw myself in those lines. I saw what could become of the heaviness I carried, if I was willing to give it to the One who had promised to take it.
I did. Not because I had everything figured out, but because I had grown tired of carrying it alone. Matthew 11:28 says come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. That was exactly the exchange I needed.
What I Know Now That I Could Not Name Then
What I understand now as a clinician, that I could not articulate in that dorm room, is that grief without a safe place to land will always search for an exit. The pain does not disappear on its own. It moves. It becomes something. For many people that exit becomes a substance, a behavior, or a pattern that provides temporary relief from a wound that has never been properly treated. God became my safe landing place before I had the clinical language to understand why that mattered so much. That is one of the reasons this work is not just a career for me. It is a calling.
What I Want You to Know
You are not too far gone. You are not too broken, too lost, or too used up to be found and restored. The same God who reached out His hand in my darkness knows exactly where you are in yours. He is not waiting for you to have it together. He is meeting you in the middle of it.
If God can reach into a dorm room in the middle of the night for a grieving girl who had run out of reasons to stay, He can reach into wherever you are right now.
If you are in a dark season, you do not have to stay there alone.
Share your own story in the contact page (send a message) if you feel led. There is power in knowing someone else has been where you are.
If you are carrying more than you can hold, reach out. Book a free 15-minute consultation to explore therapy or coaching at josianesomo.com.
And if you need something to hold onto in the meantime, the God and Recovery Volume 1 is available to download free here https://selar.com/0r24m1754f.
You are not alone in this.