Loving those without light

From Piper's "When I Don't Desire God"

There is no wasted work in loving those without light. 

You cannot persuade a depressed person that he is not reprobate if he is utterly persuaded that he is. But you can stand by him. And you can keep soaking him, as John Newton did for William Cowper, in the "benevolence, mercy, goodness, and sympathy" of Jesus, and "the sufficiency of the atonement," and "the fullness and completeness of Christ's justification." He may say that they are wonderful, but that they do not belong to him - as Cowper did. But in God's time these truths may yet be given the power to awaken hope and beget a spirit of adoption. Or, even in the absence of evidence that peace is given, they may be used in some mysterious way to sustain the mustard seed of faith that is so small it cannot be seen.

In my own time of feeling alone and helpless, in the midst of which all things I despair, one thing that always brings joy to my heart is sitting alone but not alone. I am nearby other people, be it in a restaurant, or a coffee shop, or a park, and their trust in the sufficiency of Christ slowly seeps out of their conversation and is revealed to me. I don't like to eavesdrop, but I want/need to hear people finding joy in the Lord, and not in a way that testifies to the masses which is filled with production value, but in private, to people who care about them, and who have walked the faith with them, like Newton did with Cowper. To know that those two people sitting next to me, unaware that their testimony has any value outside of themselves, are trusting in the same Gospel that I do, and that the joy they experience as evidence of that faith is the same one I have access to.

"Bitter-Sweet"

George Herbert, 1633

Ah my deare angrie Lord,

Since thou dost love, yet strike; 

Cast down, yet help afford; 

Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise; 

I will bewail, approve: 

And all my sowre-sweet dayes

I will lament, and love.