Before There Was Light: When You Don't Know What's Next

Sunday, James Drake opened our Foundations series with It All Begins with God, a message on Genesis 1. Somewhere in the middle he stopped on verse 2 and said it hit him “like a Mack truck” this week. Same. I’ve been chewing on it ever since. — Jeff Reed

“I don’t know what’s next.”

That might be the most honest sentence a lot of us could say out loud right now… and the one we work hardest not to say.

I’ll go first. I run live production for a living. My whole world is run sheets, cue lists and countdown clocks. Hand me a plan with a timeline and I’m fine. Hand me a blank page with no timeline and something in my chest gets tight.

So verse 2 got me.

Genesis 1:2, the verse nobody puts on a mug

Genesis 1:1 is on coffee mugs everywhere. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Verse 2 isn’t on any mug I’ve ever seen.

“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2)

Read it again, slowly. No light yet. No order, no plan anyone could point to. Just dark, and deep, and nothing with a shape to it.

And the Spirit of God, hovering over all of it.

James named the feeling: not knowing what’s next

James didn’t leave verse 2 as a theology lesson. He went straight at the thing a lot of us carry into church on Sunday and right back out again.

Maybe your relationship feels like it’s coming to an end, he said, and when you look ahead there’s just blackness. Maybe you don’t know what’s going to happen in your career. Maybe you just retired and you’re trying to figure out what’s next. Maybe you’re just starting out and you don’t even know what school to go to, let alone the ten steps after that.

And then he said it. God’s Spirit is hovering, and He’s working. Before anything begins, He’s there, and He has a plan.

That’s the felt need, isn’t it? It’s not always pain, exactly. It’s the in-between. The old thing is ending, or already over, and the new thing hasn’t shown up. You’d give almost anything just to see the next page.

What we do in the dark

Let’s be honest about what most of us do there.

We try to see around the corner. We refresh the inbox. We rehearse conversations that haven’t happened yet. We lie awake at 2 a.m. building the five-year plan, because if we can just get the plan, maybe the dark won’t feel so dark.

Church, I think we’ve quietly decided God only shows up once there’s something to see. When the offer letter comes. When the doctor finally calls back. When the relationship either heals or ends and at least we know which.

Verse 2 won’t let us believe that.

Before God said one word… before “let there be light”… His Spirit was already over the dark water. James said it was preparing to work, to create, to “burst forth in darkness with light and life.” The dark wasn’t an empty room God had wandered out of. It was the very place He was about to speak into.

So is God late, or am I just impatient?

I’ve asked myself that one a lot this week.

Honestly? Usually it’s me.

I don’t say that to beat anybody up. The dark is real. Not knowing is hard, and some of you are in a season that’s lasted way longer than you ever thought you could stand. I’m not going to hand you a formula for that. I don’t have one, and Genesis doesn’t give me one.

But verse 3 does tell me what happened next. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3)

The dark didn’t figure out the light on its own. The light came when God spoke, on His timing.

Which means my job in the in-between isn’t to manufacture the next page. I can’t. My job is to stay close enough to hear Him when He speaks it.

A line of people at the water

This is the part I can’t shake.

That same morning, not long after James preached this, a whole line of people came up front to be baptized. James tied it together himself. The same God who hovered over the waters in Genesis 1 was there over the water that morning, as people went under and came up to a new life.

I don’t know every one of their stories. But I’d bet some of them once sat in a season with no shape to it at all, no idea what was coming next… and God was hovering the whole time.

Where’s your formless and void?

So let me ask you what I’ve been asking myself.

Where are you not knowing what’s next right now? The marriage? The job? The house that got quiet after the kids left? The college application sitting open on the laptop?

What if He’s already hovering over it?

If that’s you, please don’t carry it by yourself. Grab someone at Christchurch this Sunday, or send our team a prayer request this week. I’d love to pray with you… and I’d really love to hear what He speaks into it.

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