A response from kinwove
Yes. So many of them.
Abraham left everything with no map, not knowing where he was going (Hebrews 11:8). He waited decades for the son God promised, and when God finally asked him to give that son back — to kill him — Abraham went to the mountain. Genesis 22 doesn't tell us he felt confident. It tells us he went. And later, Hebrews 11:19 says he believed God could raise Isaac from the dead. That's trust in absolute darkness: the person you love most, about to die, and you're walking toward it anyway because you've decided God is trustworthy.
Sarah laughed when told she'd have a child at ninety. Not because she was mean — because it was absurd. But she had the child anyway (Hebrews 11:11). The text says she "considered him faithful" — not that she felt peaceful about it, but that she held it as true.
Job, as I said — but read it fresh. His friends show up and for seven days they sit with him in silence. That's the only part of the book where anyone gets it right. Then they start explaining his suffering, defending God's reputation, and Job keeps saying: that's not true to what I'm experiencing. He argues with God for thirty chapters. And God shows up not with answers but with presence — asking him to consider the vastness of creation — and Job's response is "I spoke of things I did not understand" (Job 42:3). He doesn't get an explanation. He gets God. And that's enough.
The disciples after the crucifixion. All of them abandoned Jesus. Peter denied even knowing him. They hid behind locked doors. But something happened — the resurrection — that turned them into people willing to be arrested, beaten, imprisoned for saying he was alive. They didn't feel safe. They felt terrified. And they went forward anyway.
Thomas gets a reputation for doubt, but read John 20:24–29 carefully. He doesn't believe the other disciples' report because he needs to see and touch for himself — a reasonable thing to want. But when Jesus appears to him, Thomas doesn't ask for proof. He recognizes him and says "My Lord and my God." Jesus's response is interesting: "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." That's a word for you, actually. Jesus is saying the deeper faith is the one that holds without the seeing.
The pattern across all of them: trust isn't about the feeling. It's about the decision to believe God is good and faithful even when the evidence in front of you looks like the opposite. Even when silence is all you have.
What does darkness look like for you right now?