Ahasa Dihaweth Lyrics by Paul Fernando

Looking up toward the sky, looking down toward the earth,
in the hour when I cannot see you……
Cutting the darkness away and giving light,
receive me, O Father…….

This is a very short hymn, and it captures in just four lines the whole experience of searching for a God who feels hidden. The singer looks everywhere he can, “looking up toward the sky, looking down toward the earth,” scanning the heights and the depths, and yet it is “the hour when I cannot see you.” It is the honest confession of a soul in a dark stretch, straining to find God and coming up empty.

But the little song does not stay in the darkness; it turns straight into prayer. “Cutting the darkness away and giving light,” it asks God to do the one thing that will end the search, to break through the gloom himself. The believer cannot dispel the darkness on his own; only God’s light can do that.

The final word is the tenderest and most trusting of all: “receive me, O Father.” He does not demand explanations or answers, only to be taken in, welcomed home, held. And the name he uses, “Father,” tells us why he can pray this way even when he cannot see, because his relationship with God is that of a child to a parent. What the listener is left with is the pure simplicity of faith in the dark, a heart that cannot find God asking only that God find him, cut through the night, and gather him in.