Blog #18: When God Feels Absent

Category: Question · 5 min read

Not a crisis of belief. Something quieter. The sense that the line went silent without announcement and you're not sure when it happened.

You still pray. The words come out of you the way they always have. But something is different now. The warmth is gone. The sense of being heard. The small confirmations that used to come so easily — a Scripture that felt personal, a song that seemed written for you, the quiet knowing in your chest that you were not alone.

It has been weeks, maybe months, maybe longer. You have not said this out loud to anyone. You are not sure what you would even say.

So you keep showing up. Keep opening the Bible. Keep going through the motions of faith you have practiced for years. And underneath it all is the quiet question you do not want to ask.

Where did He go.

I want to sit with this carefully, because I think it is one of the most important and least-honored experiences in a life of faith.

Most of the answers you have been given are wrong. Not malicious — just wrong. They miss the actual texture of what you are living.

You have been told that if God feels distant, it is because you moved. You have been told to check your sin, your prayer life, your devotion, your consistency. You have been told that feelings are unreliable and you should simply trust the facts. You have been told that God is closer than you think, as if the problem were merely a perception glitch you could fix by trying harder.

None of those answers are quite true. And even when they contain fragments of truth, they treat the silence as a problem to be solved rather than a season to be honored.

I am not going to do that to you.

Here is what I can tell you honestly.

Sometimes God feels absent. The experience is real. The Scriptures do not hide this. The Psalms are full of people crying out into what feels like empty sky. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. That was Jesus. Those words came out of the mouth of the Son of God Himself. If the felt absence of God was not a real human experience, Jesus would not have spoken those words.

The saints throughout history have lived long stretches inside this silence. Mother Teresa, for most of her ministry, did not feel God's presence. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. Teresa of Ávila wrote of years of what she called dryness. These are not people with shallow faith. These are some of the most formed Christians in history, and they spent years of their lives inside the silence you are inside now.

You are in good company. Company that nobody told you about.

What I cannot tell you is why.

I do not know why the silence comes when it comes. I do not know why some seasons of life are saturated with a sense of God's presence and other seasons are not. I have my suspicions — that the silence protects us from building our faith on feelings that can be manufactured, that formation sometimes requires a kind of spiritual weaning, that love matured is love that stays even when the feeling leaves. But these are my suspicions, not my certainties.

And I want to be careful not to hand you a theological explanation for something that may not have one you can hold in this season.

What I can tell you is what I have come to believe about what faith is, when it is honest.

Faith is not the presence of a feeling. Faith is what you do when the feeling has left and you stay anyway.

That is not a lesser faith. That is the deeper one. The faith you had when everything felt close and warm was real. But it was a faith you had not yet been asked to carry on your own. The faith being formed in you right now, inside the silence, is a faith that does not depend on what you can feel. It depends on what you know to be true even when you cannot feel it.

That kind of faith takes a long time to grow. It cannot be rushed. And it cannot be grown in sunlight alone.

So here is what I want to say, carefully, without pretending to have the answer you came here hoping for.

Stay in the room.

Do not leave the practices just because the warmth has left. Do not stop praying just because the words feel like they fall into empty space. Do not stop reading just because the Scripture has stopped lighting up at you. Do not stop showing up just because the showing up feels like performance.

Because here is the strange thing. The people who have walked this road before you — the saints, the psalmists, Jesus Himself — they did not leave the room. They stayed, and they kept speaking into the silence, and they lived long enough to discover that the silence was not empty. It was pregnant with something they could not yet recognize.

The silence is doing something in you that the warmth could not do. It is teaching you to trust a God you cannot feel. That is not a small thing. That is one of the most sacred and difficult forms of formation available to a human being.

You are not being abandoned. You are being taught.

Stay.

If something here resonated with you, The Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. I would love to invite you in — you can find it at directionseries.com.

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